Outsourcing hard drive space. Y/N?

May 6, 2009 10:45 AM

Is there a way to batch download pictures from my Flickr account? How reliable is Flickr as a resource for saving photos?

My wife uses our Flickr pro account extensively. There are currently over 4,400 photos in our stream. After uploading pictures to Flickr, she deletes the local copies on our computer. Having the sole copies of these pictures of family & friends exist only on Flickr's servers makes the little data geek in me slightly nervous. I'd hate for some catastrophic Flickr failure to cause us to permanently lose all these memories.

So....is there a way I can download these pictures (or a portion of these pictures) in a batch? There are obviously way too many photos to go one-by-one. Furthermore, how reliable is Flickr as a service that can be counted upon to store all our pictures? I imagine Yahoo's servers are more reliable than my PC and external HDD. Am I just being paranoid?

posted by gnutron to computers & internet (16 comments total)

This comes up often on the Flickr help forum. There are third party tools that do batch downloads. This link searches the help forum for "batch download".

And, no, you don't want your only copy of a photo to be on Flickr.
posted by plastic_animals at 10:53 AM on May 6 [1 favorite has favorites]

It is a very roundabout way of doing it, but using the photobook software "booksmart" (which you can download for free from www.blurb.com) I noticed that you can download multiple photos from Flickr in one go.

Not a very clean solution to the problem, but it does work.
posted by BritishGas at 10:53 AM on May 6

Flickr is very reliable, the chances of your photos being "lost" from Flickr are slim to none. I would feel very safe having them on the site. I personally use SmugMug for all of my DSLR shots and use their SmugVault to backup all of the original copies to Amazon's S3. I would suggest using a cloud based backup solution to store originals on.

I would try Downloadr, I've used it in the past and it was pretty solid.
posted by bjtitus at 10:53 AM on May 6

Furthermore, how reliable is Flickr as a service that can be counted upon to store all our pictures?

I've used them for years and never had any problems.

Be aware that if you don't renew your account, you only have access to the most recently uploaded photos (100, I think). They don't delete the older ones, but they don't display them either. Renewing the account gives you full access again.
posted by zippy at 10:53 AM on May 6

Flickr downloaders up to your eyeballs. I haven't used one in a while but when I did it worked out well. Can't remember which one it was though.
posted by theichibun at 10:53 AM on May 6

You are right to not trust Flickr alone to store your photos. Given Yahoo's recent announcement that they are going to shut down and delete all of Geocities shows that they're willing to throw out the data of thousands of people.

In the past, I've used FlickrEdit to batch download all of my Flickr pictures. There are several other Flickr backup utilities.
posted by zsazsa at 10:54 AM on May 6

There are a few open source software tools that will do this. I haven't used any of them. FlickrBackup seems to be the one mainly around (lifehacker review) are two I know of. Flickr does have some sort of API access to files, I'm not sure if it's FTP or what. There are also little companies that will send you a DVD of your pictures for a nominal cost. I can't speak to the sanity of keeping all your photos only on Flickr but I'd always feel better having a backup.
posted by jessamyn at 10:56 AM on May 6

Whether or not you should trust Flickr depends entirely on timescale. Can you trust them to keep your photos for the next few weeks? Almost certainly. The next year? Probably. The next decade? I'm not so sure — the IT world moves fast; Flickr could be seriously "old and busted," the Geocities of whatever has supplanted Web 2.0, in a few years. It's not hard to imagine Yahoo (or whoever owns Yahoo) deciding to pull the plug.

I wouldn't trust it as your only backup for your originals (you can't store Raw files on it anyway), but it's not a bad additional element to your backup strategy.

Personally, I back up all my my scans and digital photos to a couple of external hard drives and periodically to DVD-R, and then I upload the ones I'm really fond of to Flickr as full-res JPEGs. Worst case scenario (say if my house were wiped out in a tsunami), I'd still have the ones on Flickr, provided I downloaded them promptly. But I wouldn't depend on Flickr as my only backup for any length of time or as a "fire and forget" solution where you expect everything to be there in 10 or 20 years.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:02 AM on May 6

I wondered about this too, and from digging in the forums I see Heather says Flickr has an enterprise-class backend with the usual data retention safeguards in place, along with off-site backups in case of nuclear war &c. You can download all your photos yourself with a backup tool (eg flump), or you can pay a 3rd party service like QOOP to put them on a disk for you.
posted by mullingitover at 11:07 AM on May 6

LifestreamBackup is another service that will back up from Flickr directly to Amazon S3.
posted by COD at 11:15 AM on May 6

I downloaded about 250.000 photos for superbertram, a project of a friend, to create a movie out of a year of continuous photos. Turns out, we did this just soon enough, a few weeks later flickr deleted the pro-account and all the photos (superbertrams memory!) without a warning.

For this task, the tools mentioned here were not sufficient. There is even a a virtual filesystem, flickrfs. In the end phpFlickr, an wrapper for Flickr's great API worked best. There are wrappers for many languages linked on the API page. This way you can get lots of details with each photo. If this is an option for you, I can send you my scripts if you want.
posted by dnial at 11:45 AM on May 6 [1 favorite has favorites]

Be aware that if you don't renew your account, you only have access to the most recently uploaded photos (100, I think). They don't delete the older ones, but they don't display them either.

Not really. You have access to all your photos, even if your paid account lapses ... as long as you've saved the URLs and are willing to access them one URL at a time.

Chances are that you haven't done that with 4,000 photos. But it's not strictly accurate to say you'll have no access to them. You'll have access -- if you take the arduous necessary precautions. Also, you can always pay for another year of your account to restore the unrestrained access if it lapses.

The official cross-every-t-and-dot-every-i answer to your question is that you should have a separate backup and not rely on Flickr. More realistically, I've kept my photos on Flickr for a few years without backing them up, I haven't had any problems, and I don't expect to have any problems. But if you're already worrying about this, you might as well just get the backup, at least for your peace of mind.
posted by Jaltcoh at 2:45 PM on May 6

flickr is not a reliable place to store your pics -- all it takes for your paid account to be deleted forever with no recourse is a complaint from someone who doesn't like something you said and shot.
they will also change their policy on the fly with no warnings.
posted by 3mendo at 5:29 PM on May 6

(and/or shot)
posted by 3mendo at 5:30 PM on May 6

I second what 3mendo said as my main worry with Flickr, gmail, etc.
posted by mikepop at 5:56 AM on May 7

all it takes for your paid account to be deleted forever with no recourse is a complaint from someone who doesn't like something you said and shot.

I find it hard to believe that they delete all your content if anyone complains about something you've posted. Source?
posted by Jaltcoh at 2:09 PM on May 7