How to Transfer Your Photos From Flickr to Another Service
Flickr isn’t going anywhere, but a lot of your photos will disappear if you don’t follow its new limits : 1,000 photos, period. These photos can be of any size, but you only have a thousand of them. The era of free terabytes of Flickr storage is coming to an end.
Ignore Flickr’s new rules and this is what you will face in the next few months:
- Starting Tuesday, January 8th , free users who exceed the 1000 photo limit will not be able to upload new photos to Flickr.
- Starting Tuesday, February 5th , Flickr will begin removing photos (oldest first) for free users who exceed the 1000 photo limit. The deletion continues until there are 1000 photos in your account.
If you don’t want to pay $ 50 a year for Flickr Pro – which frees you from those restrictions and adds other fun features like ad-free browsing, video downloads up to 10 minutes each, and tons of stats – you probably want to. manually shorten your account. (It’s or maybe it’s time to transfer all your photos to another service.)
How to download all your photos from Flickr
Before, you had to use some third party tool to grab all of your photos (or manually download batches of photos or individual albums directly from Flickr itself). You can still do this using any number of the apps , but I recommend grabbing your photos directly from Flickr’s site. It’s not a complicated process, and it ensures you don’t miss out on anything.
If you don’t care about your photos being organized into albums, you can use Flickr’s “Your Flickr Data” section in Flickr’s Settings to get all the information the service stores about you, including account settings, profile information, and your photos. … and video, ”notes Flickr. Simply go to your account page , find the option to request data in the lower right corner, click the button and wait a few hours (or many hours) for Flickr to process your request. You will receive an email when your archive is ready to download and you can always check the link on this page if you feel impatient.
If you’ve relied on Flickr albums to organize your many photos, you’ll find that the Flickr archive is still a dump for your photos, period. You will have to go back and reorganize them yourself, which can be a little annoying. To get around this, you can always opt out of the generic Flickr tool and download archives of your photos through their albums instead.
Bring up the list of albums on Flickr, hover over the album and click the download arrow. Repeat these steps for all of your albums to keep all the grouped photos together. However, a warning: any photos that are not in the albums will not be saved when using this technique.
Now what?
No matter how you download your photos to your computer, the big question remains: what do you do with them? I would not recommend storing them on your desktop or laptop forever – unless you have multiple backup options that you use to preserve your data, as one computer disaster is all you need to lose valuable photos, valuable over the years.
While the cloud isn’t ideal, as the big changes to Flickr show that even popular and seemingly invulnerable sites can disappear – or dramatically change their service offerings – uploading your photos elsewhere is a great way to protect them from hardware failures, at least the least.
The first and most obvious option you can switch to is Google Photos . It is completely free, there are no restrictions on the amount of memory, and it supports up to 16MP pictures and video with resolutions up to 1080p. This should be enough for most people; If you need to save your original media in the highest quality format, you will need to pay for a Google One storage plan . At $ 20 cheaper than an annual Flickr subscription, you can get 200GB of storage for your photos, or 2TB for double the cost of Flickr.
You can also just stick with Flickr if you’re moving on to using the site as a portfolio for the work you want to showcase, rather than as a persistent storage solution. Make sure you use the Organize tool to remove what you no longer need before Flickr makes the decision for you.
500px is another good online option, and its basic plan (with unlimited downloads) starts at $ 48 per year. It’s a small savings over the Flickr Pro plan, but it’s a good alternative if you’re looking for something new. Don’t try to use his free account, though: you’re limited to a total of 2,000 images and a paltry seven downloads per week.
If you’re already paying a small yearly fortune for Amazon Prime, it’s easy: upload all of your images to Amazon Photos , where you have unlimited storage space for images of any size and resolution. Videos, not much – you get 5GB for the game, which you fill up pretty quickly.
Back side? If you ever ditch Amazon Prime, your unlimited storage is gone. You should be able to upload your saved photos for about three months, but eventually Amazon will start deleting your photos.
Finally, if you’re feeling tricky, you can always roll back your own photo storage setting. If you enjoy facing danger and prefer keeping your photos on your desktop, an application like Adobe Bridge CC or digiKam can help you stay organized. If you want to host your gallery yourself and have an accessible web server with lots of memory to play with, try apps like Lychee , Chevereto (which we talked about earlier ), Piwigo, or any of them. other options from this comprehensive list . Run them on your server and your images can live in your own Flickr-like environment – without any restrictions.