Extraction of data from Flickr
There are a number of things going on here, but it boils down to Amdahl's Law.

I am going to take a stab at some guessing here, but I expect my numbers to be in the right ballparks. Your code does:


Collection groupNames = people.getPublicGroups(userID);
For each Group:

you connect to flickr
you download the data
you parse it
you write-to-file.



Here are things that you are doing slower than necessary:


you are parsing the same URL many times (as many times as you have groups to process), as the URL does not change inside the loop. If you process it once outside the loop, you will get the same results.
Is you file output buffered?
Do you need to doc.getDocumentElement().normalize(); ?


Now, as for the real application of Amdahl's law, and, assuming the URL is wrong that you are processing (and that there should be 1 URL per group), you should: run things in parallel.

Consider something like:

ExecutorService service = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(....);
....
LinkedList&lt;Future&lt;String&gt;&gt; futureops = new LinkedList&lt;&gt;();

while (...) {
    futureops.add(service.submit(new Callable&lt;Integer&gt;() {
        public String call() throws IOException {
            // ****** Will need to probably do this as a separate class to get  *****
            // ****** it to compile right, or use `final` judiciously.          *****
            DocumentBuilderFactory f = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
            DocumentBuilder b = f.newDocumentBuilder();
            Document doc = b.parse(urlString);

            doc.getDocumentElement().normalize();
            NodeList items = doc.getElementsByTagName("group");
            Node n = items.item(poolCounter);
            Element e = (Element) n;

            //get total photos in group
            String numberOfPhotos = e.getAttribute("pool_count");
            //get members in the group
            int numberOfMembers = gInfo.getMembers();       
            return "\t" + name + " " + numberOfPhotos + " photos" + ", " + numberOfMembers + " members";         
        }
    });

    while (!futureops.isEmpty()) {
        String result = futureops.removeFirst();
        file.writeFile(result);
        System.out.println(result);
        poolCounter++;
    }
}