Fotopic Backup Tool

The following program will download your entire Fotopic gallery to your local drive. It is an application with buttons, and dialogs, and all the nice things you find in your desktop OS.

You need to run it, and sign in using your my.fotopic.net login. You will then have the option of backing up your galleries to a local disk.

Things it does do:

• Download all your original files in the format "galleryname/yyyy-mm-dd collectionname/blah.jpg".
• Save collection story in readme.txt format..
• Save photo descriptions in 'descript.ion' format files.
• Run in 'fill in the gaps' mode, so you can maintain a local copy without messing around downloading the whole lot.
• Do it cleanly, simply, and quickly.

Things it doesn't do (yet):

• Check for available disk space.
• Store counter values.

Comments and notes to Joel please. If you have encounterd a problem, I may request that you send me the debug file 'fpbackup-debug.txt' which is created in your documents directory, so please keep it safe.

If you are after a command-line scriptable way of backing up your Fotopic galleries, there is a perl script available which is a lot more flexible and does a bit more than the GUI application. Find out more about that by clicking here.

Three versions of the GUI application are available:

• Mac OS X - Universal Binary, tested on Leopard and Tiger
• Windows 2000/XP/Vista
• Linux (i386) - GTK2+, tested on Slackware, Debian, Ubuntu

All are unsupported and provided as-is. Your mileage may of course vary.

NOTICE: No guarantees implied, not my responsibility, you run it at your own risk.

Known Issue

I know about the issue where it will sometimes just grind to a halt. This is owing to a bug in the RealBASIC socket implementation which unfortunately I can't fix without buying a new copy of RealBASIC. If you want to help persuade me to do this you could always buy me something nice from my Amazon wishlist.

Changelog

1.0.48 (2010-03-10):

• Changed calling mechanism to work with Fotopic's new API changes.
• Made slightly more resilient.

1.0.47 (2008-06-04):

• Fixed Win32-specific issue which would die on some directory names.
• Some further XML issues fixed.
• Added in per-file progress.
• There's a definite "I've finished" popup now ;P
• More resilient to 'broken' images.
• Doesn't crash when you hit 'cancel' after choosing a new destination directory.
• Some debugging turned down now I've fixed stuff, and some errors trapped.

Note: From this version, some directories which are created in OS X or Linux will be different to those created using the Windows version. This is due to limitations in the individual filesystems and cannot be helped - sorry.

1.0.33 (2008-05-27):

• International characters preserved where possible.
• Tags, groups, copyright, dates and titles all preserved in readme.txt on a per-collection basis.

1.0.32 (2008-05-26):

• Deals with empty collections better.
• Added in extra display of what it's doing.

1.0.27 (2008-05-21):

• Debug log is created - please forward this to me if you get problems.
• If XMLExceptions are thrown (for whatever reason), now tries to continue from the next collection instead of dying.
• Collection name is shown when downloading.
• Fixed bug where if debug was switched on, 100% CPU was used on Mac OS X Leopard.

1.0.24 (2008-05-17):

• Better reporting of error conditions in HTTP transfer.
• Fixed bug where you could get away with not selecting any galleries to copy.

1.0.22 (2008-05-17):

• Fixed problem saving if gallery had illegal characters in it.
• More resilience to XML errors now.

1.0.20 (2008-05-16):

• Fixed bad filenames (and thus nothing downloading) if collection name or filename had bad characters in them.
• "Ignore existing" is a bit faster.
• Fixed exception when reaching the end of the run with a collection with one photo in it.

© 2010 Joel Rowbottom