What's the simplest way to download all of my photos off of Flickr?

August 5, 2018 12:34 PM

I'm trying to find a way to batch download all of the photos I've uploaded to Flickr in the original quality that I uploaded them to the site. Is there a way to do this?
posted by Proginoskes to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

There's no easy way to do this from within the site. You can do it but there's a lot of bulk selecting and it's possibly buggy. However the App Garden has some applications which may do it. Since the acquisition by SmugMug I don't think things have changed appreciably but there may be wrinkles in this. Best option would depend whether you have 100MB to download (in which case the site will work just fine, you can go to Camera Roll and select and download a ZIP file) or more like several GB (in which case trial/error in the app garden would be suggested if no one here has suggestions). I sorted them by recent and this one is at the top of the list even though it's still several years old.
posted by jessamyn at 1:30 PM on August 5, 2018

When evaluating solutions, decide whether you just need the photos or if you care about getting all the extra data like photo title, description, comments, map location, etc. All that metadata is harder to capture and I'm not aware of any solution that then lets you re-import it to some other photo hosting site intact.
posted by Nelson at 2:17 PM on August 5, 2018

Best answer: http://getbulkr.com

Worked for me. Good luck!
posted by Simon_ at 2:34 PM on August 5, 2018 [5 favorites]

You can download your original photos directly on Flickr either via Albums or Flickr's Camera Roll. Camera Roll has a limit of 500 photos/download while Albums have a 5000/download limit. In Camera Roll just highlight the photos you want to download and a dialogue box will appear with several options, one of which is downloading. To download by Album click on the downward facing arrow in the Album header.

Either way, Flickr will then build a zip file of all the photos you've chosen. That sometimes takes a while if you've chosen many photos, if you have large originals, or if downloading is busy across the site. Note that if you put photos in multiple albums you will get multiple downloads of those photos. If that's the case you might want to make unique albums just for downloading purposes. And as Nelson said, this will only give you the original file that you uploaded, not any of the associated metadata. Official info here.

Bulkr, mentioned above, is the third party downloader that is most frequently recommended on the Flickr Help Forum.
posted by plastic_animals at 4:48 PM on August 5, 2018