could I hire someone to download Flickr photos for me?

April 6, 2017 7:51 AM

My download speed is slow and I can't seem to download large batches of Flickr photos at home or at work. Where should I look to get this done?

I accidentally deleted large batches (a few GBs) of some travel photos of mine on my hard drive -- luckily, though, they're still in my Flickr account! Unfortunately, when I batch download from Flickr, whether at home or at work, it always times out.

I assume this is due to my slow download speed, so I was wondering where I should go/look to hire someone to download these for me and pop them onto a thumb drive. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan if that helps for locating a brick and mortar place, if it turns out that's all I need to do. I tried googling such a thing, but to no avail. Is this something that's commonly done? What would you call this service if I called a computer repair shop?

Any advice would be appreciated -- the end goal, of course, is simply having those batched Flickr zip files on my hard drive.

Thanks!

posted by knownassociate to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

Best answer: I don't know the area, but the places that come to mind are a public library and an internet cafe-- the latter probably doesn't exist, while the former has more computers and internet than ever before.

If you happen to know anyone who works at a media company, they can very likely do it for you over a fast work connection.

Another option is to make smaller batches of photos. Or get a downloader application (often a browser plug-in, but not exclusively) on your computer which can resume downloads.
posted by Sunburnt at 9:02 AM on April 6, 2017

Best answer: The download failures may be a Flickr problem rather than a bandwidth issue. Here's one thread of complaints from the Flickr Help Forum. The suggestions there are to 1) make sure there are no videos in the batch download, and 2) break up the download files into smaller sizes. Someone also mentions that they found a helpful Chrome plug-in.
posted by plastic_animals at 9:03 AM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You could use Amazon's Mechanical Turk so find someone who will do it for you.
posted by spilon at 9:29 AM on April 6, 2017

Best answer: How about here, on Jobs?
posted by macapes at 10:09 AM on April 6, 2017

Best answer: I don't know of a service like that. As you note you really only need a fast connection. A local coffee shop might also have good wifi.

Not sure what tool you're using now, but you might try using a different tool to download since it might be a problem with the tool itself. In addition to the onsite download option, these are the 2 apps most commonly used to download en masse from Flickr:

http://getbulkr.com/
http://www.flickrdownloader.com/
posted by Jungo at 11:03 AM on April 6, 2017

Best answer: I feel like it would be cheaper and easier to just bump your internet speed up for one month. I am not on a contract for my Comcast service, so I can raise and lower my speed at any time.

If the download is timing out, however, that suggests the issue might be on Flickr's end with their servers. You might need to do things in smaller batches. Googling "flickr batch download" seems to offer up some tips and third-party websites you can use instead.
posted by AppleTurnover at 4:06 PM on April 6, 2017