flickr-export-browser

A small self-hosted web page for browsing your own downloaded Flickr export at home: photos, timeline, albums, comments, contacts, groups, mail, faves and tags.

Not affiliated with Flickr. This is an independent hobby project for browsing your own export at home. It is not a Flickr clone, doesn't talk to Flickr, and isn't meant for the public internet. "Flickr" is a trademark of its owner.

Screenshots

Quick start

1. Request your data from Flickr. You'll get a whole bunch of zip files. Extract all of them into one folder. The folder can be named anything you like, and its name is what shows up in the account picker, e.g. robin/.

   If you have more than one person's export, give each their own folder and put them side by side:

   flickr-backup/
     robin/    <- all of Robin's zips extracted here
     ben/
     bill/
     fred/
   

   Each folder ends up containing files like account_profile.json, albums.json, photo_<id>.json and the photos themselves.

2. Point the app at the parent folder (flickr-backup/ above) and start it:

   cp .env.example .env        # set DATA_DIR=/path/to/flickr-backup
   docker compose pull         # fetch the prebuilt image
   docker compose up -d

   Prefer to build it yourself? Use docker compose up -d --build instead.

3. Open http://localhost:8080.

With one folder you go straight to that account; with several you get a picker. Your export is mounted read-only and is never changed.

Container image

Tagged releases publish a multi-arch (amd64 and arm64) image to the GitHub Container Registry:

docker pull ghcr.io/rk295/flickr-export-browser:latest

See the releases page for versions. Each release is built by .github/workflows/release.yaml when a v* tag is pushed.

Using it

• Search: the box in the top bar (press /) searches photos, albums, comments, mail, group posts and people.
• Photos: sort, and filter by year, album, comments or location. Click a photo for the full-size view and use the arrow keys to move between photos.
• Timeline: photos, comments, mail, group posts and albums by date, by date taken or date uploaded.
• Everything else: comments made and received, contacts and followers, groups, Flickr mail, faves and tags.
• Several accounts: a contact or commenter who is also one of your accounts links through to it.

The first start with a large export takes a while to make thumbnails. Progress shows in the top bar and you can browse meanwhile.

Adding accounts

Drop another export folder into the data directory. It appears within a minute, with no restart. Exports split into parts (*_part001.json) are merged automatically.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Purpose
DATA_DIR	./data	Folder containing one sub-folder per account
HTTP_PORT	8080	Port to publish

Thumbnails are cached in ./cache. You can delete it at any time; thumbnails are rebuilt on demand.

Behind a reverse proxy: copy docker-compose.override.yml.example to docker-compose.override.yml and edit the hostname and labels. Compose merges it automatically.

There is no login. Run it on a trusted network only.

Development

npm ci
DATA_DIR=/path/to/flickr-backup CACHE_DIR=/tmp/flickr-cache PORT=8080 npm start
npm run lint

CI runs ESLint, a syntax check and a Docker build, on both GitHub Actions and Gitea Actions (.github/workflows/). Architecture notes for contributors and coding agents are in AGENTS.md.

License

MIT