Use python-flickrapi 1.2 even after the Flickr SSL transition
On June 27 2014, Flickr changed their API to be SSL-only. The Python flickrapi library was one of many pieces of software that used HTTP to connect to Flickr’s API, and that therefore broke for some users on June 27.
flickrapi supports HTTPS connections as of version 1.4.4, released on June 18 2014. If you are able to upgrade to a new version of flickrapi, you can get the latest flickrapi version from PyPI and ignore the rest of this post.
However, as of mid-2014, many Linux distros, including Ubuntu 14.04 (supported until 2019), still package flickrapi version 1.2, which cannot connect to Flickr’s API over HTTPS and is therefore now non-functional. Since developers may for various reasons choose to use their distro’s version of python-flickrapi, I’ve written a very very small Python class that overrides flickrapi’s FlickrAPI class to connect to Flickr over HTTPS rather than HTTP, and allows continued use of the Flickr API.
You can download my Python module that allows this: flickrapissl. See the README for usage.