Leaving Flickr, but where and how?

June 7, 2013 9:44 AM

Well, I'm done with Flickr for a variety of reasons. So I need a new place to put the 10,000 photos I have there and the 10,000 more I'll take in the next few years. But where? And is there a simple, relatively painless way to transfer all those images?

I need a place that is like Flickr (used to be) - looks good, showcases my photos, stores them at full resolution forever, allows me to organize them obsessively into groups, lets me decide who sees what but makes it fairly easy to share them by integrating nicely with a variety of platforms from wordpress to metachat to twitter and beyond and is nevertheless simple and straightforward to use. And also, just to get it out of the way, that is absolutely not Facebook.

For background information, I'm a dedicated amateur photographer who would love to turn pro. I do get the occasional paying gig - weddings, headshots, portraits - here and there and sometimes even sell a print or two. I've had one one person photography show about three years ago; I've been thinking it's time to look for another but I'm not currently in any galleries. I take mostly landscapes, nature shots and street photography. And, I also take tons of pictures of my friends and my dogs and random stuff I happen across, which I don't necessarily want or need to be in the same place as the more "pro" stuff. One of the things I liked about Flickr was that I could have both and not feel weird about it.

I've looked at and started accounts on both 500px and ipernity but neither one seems like exactly what I want - for the interesting reason that 500px seems TOO professional and ipernity is not professional enough. Also, I'm running into trouble transferring. ipernity has a really good, really simple bulk uploader greasemonkey script to transfer the photos, complete with their data, hurrah, but it turns out there's a limit on how much I can upload for free and I can't actually find any information on their site on account types - or info on anything, really, which is sort of worrisome. 500px kindly gave me a free membership for a month but it doesn't seem to have a good way to transfer the photos en masse. Even if I do it one by one - which is hellish; I did just 30 photos using the transfer utility on their uploader and wanted to tear my hair out - it doesn't transfer the data, which is a dealbreaker. Anyone with any info on better ways to transfer, I'm all ears! Or, what other sites are out there that I haven't even thought about?

Given that what I want might not exist - what comes closest? And if nothing does, how do I get my photos off Flickr while I look and where do I put them? Difficulty level: I am really, seriously, intensely broke, so I can't afford to spend $25 here and $50 there figuring this out. I'm prepared to spend like $30 but that's all, and I do mean all, I can afford so whatever I end up with has to be a permanent solution. I'd like to do this soon, too: ideally, today - I want this whole thing to be over. And no, I don't think at this point that I want to suck it up and stay with Flickr; I just don't trust them anymore.

posted by mygothlaundry to Computers & Internet (18 answers total)

Try http://sunkencity.org/flickredit for grabbing your current crop of pictures off Flickr.
posted by rmd1023 at 10:03 AM on June 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

Have you looked into Picasa/Google+? It seems to me that Picasa is lately adding lots of social features to integrate into Google+. Not sure how it compares to Flickr, but for $20/year for 80GB of storage, it's within your price range.
posted by Grither at 10:03 AM on June 7, 2013

Uh oh, it seems I'm on a legacy plan... so it's no longer that cheap. It's 100GB for $5 a month.
posted by Grither at 10:04 AM on June 7, 2013

When I looked into 500px I got the impression that it's not meant to be a place to store all of your photos. Instead, it's a place to show off (and sell) your very best photos where they won't get lost in a photostream of bracketed images or random snapshots.
posted by stopgap at 10:07 AM on June 7, 2013

I've been trying out Everpix for storing my photos. It doesn't have the social network aspects of Flickr but you can fairly easily share photos by creating, and adding and removing photos from, a "photo page" that has its own public URL which can be shared.

I haven't tried it but it has an option to sync automatically with Flickr and the syncing with my mac/iphone has been seamless. It's also quite a nice looking website/app.

You end up with some number of months of photos free (ie. the last 6 months - i'm up to 27 free months) and then I believe its 49$ a year for unlimited storage.
posted by SpaceWarp13 at 10:10 AM on June 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was about to suggest SmugMug, but then read your financial constraints. You would probably need a paid SmugMug account for that many photos. But if your situation ever changes....
posted by StrawberryPie at 10:38 AM on June 7, 2013

I used FlickrTouchr to pull my images from Flickr. It worked perfectly after a little tinkering.
posted by seemoreglass at 10:41 AM on June 7, 2013 [4 favorites]

500px would've been my alternate site to suggest, however its intentionally NOT a place to image-dump. The place I use for that is Fotki.com. Its cheap and easy. Its not elegant nor is there a great social aspect to it like flickr, but it just plain works and I've used it for the past decade or so to deliver my client's images.

If you had a solid budget, the best solution is Photoshelter.
posted by blaneyphoto at 10:52 AM on June 7, 2013

I'm not sure what professional or not professional means in the context of 500px. The feel of it? I'm also not sure what you mean about not trusting Flickr. I think their business decisions of late have been somewhat half-assed and slipshod and not all necessarily in my interest, yes. But as disappointing as that is, I'm not sure how I go anywhere else that provides that much automation & pre-existing infrastructure and NOT expose myself to the risk that they'll change business focus.

Case in point: 500px changed their plans some time ago and I'm way less interested in the level I'm willing to pay for now.

I know that's borderline chatfiltery but I'm not 100% sure what other options might be ruled out if the constraint it's simply "not Flickr." It's hard to answer your question given that.

Are you using any photo management tools for your shots, like Picasa or Lightroom or Aperture or...?

If so, you may care what sort of integration tools exist. Lightroom has several good options for binding it to Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. The 500px plugin borders on garbage.

If you're not, I wonder if you'd obviate a lot of your needs above by having one. You'd get that obsessive grouping and tagging etc, albeit not in a visible way.

But the reality is that I don't know how you're going to find Just-like-Flicker-but-not given that any business out there providing that service has to compete with Flickr and appeal to more than just those of us who are feeling disillusioned with Flickr. Using a local photo management system and then just publishing albums gives you a lot more flexibility to use almost any hosting solution.
posted by phearlez at 11:44 AM on June 7, 2013

Picasa is very good at uploading quickly and includes a great Windows program which seamlessly integrates your computer with your web galleries. Honestly I see no benefit in uploading full-res files to the web. Even on large monitors, a full screen image doesn't have to that big of a resolution. Unless you have a very fast internet connection, transferring that many huge files is going to be a chore no matter how you are doing it.

If you want to work as a pro, instead of just playing in the social media world, you would be better off getting your own website and putting together a Wordpress themed gallery. The only cost will be your server and domain costs. I think that is a better investment than subscribing to Flickr or any other site. I pay $54/year which is a good bargain considering the amount of stuff I can do.
posted by JJ86 at 12:25 PM on June 7, 2013

Here's the details of the ipernity paid options.

ipernity Club.

Pro account FAQs.

I see they're putting a limit on the free account of only 200 items viewable.
posted by essexjan at 12:37 PM on June 7, 2013

I just had an email from Imageshack (which I haven't used in ages because I used up my free allowance) to say they're revamping and relaunching - no doubt on the back of of this Flickr change, looking for an opportunity to take some custom away from Flickr.
posted by essexjan at 2:20 PM on June 7, 2013

$30? Zenfolio basic plan is $30/year, but not sure if that's enough storage space for you.
posted by Dansaman at 2:58 PM on June 7, 2013

Ipernity seems to most mimic the Flickr model, but 500px seems to be the most reasonable leap from one platform to another. I've been torn- I'm missing a site that won't come back, looking at sites that dress up as the old flame, others that are hell-bent futurismo, and yet find other offerings that seem to be a reasonable bridge between the two. I think when the SD card hits the info highway, 500px wins out by a hair- but barely. Still wishing that someone at Yahoo will come to their senses and recognize the implications on their broader business model of a backlash like this.
posted by moonbird at 8:53 PM on June 7, 2013

I find Bulkr is great for downloading your photos off Flickr.
posted by inkypinky at 6:53 AM on June 8, 2013

500px is no good?
posted by amar at 8:40 AM on June 8, 2013

Pi.pe works well for transferring pictures from Flickr to 500px. I'm pretty sure it preserves most of the metadata, but I don't think it keeps sets. (500px themselves have recommended it!)
posted by bluefly at 11:59 AM on June 8, 2013

Bluefly, I used Pi.pe, which worked well, but it didn't keep much of the metadata and no sets. Since 500px doesn't support batch editing, there's no easy way to re-organize what I have chronologically. Ipernity preserved the sets, metadata, etc., but they don't seem to have the same polish that 500px does.
posted by moonbird at 12:17 PM on June 8, 2013