What backup Flickr photos?

Flickr is a very powerful online photo gallery and is increasingly widely used by activists. Its online nature makes it a great way to share photos between different people locally, to build up an archive of photos for annual reports and the like and, as an added bonus, it automatically generates a range of different sized photos from the one upload. One other benefit: Flickr is also a widely used website, so putting photos up there will often result in them being seen by voters above and beyond their appearance in your leaflets and on your websites.

But nothing in life is perfect, and uploading photos to Flickr should be accompanied by backups, because:

• Companies do sometimes go bust and shut down services. Yes, it may seem unthinkable that this may happen to Yahoo (owners of Flickr), but the unthinkable has a nasty habit of happening now and again.
• Flickr’s service is very reliable, but computers and cables do go wrong from time to time. Imagine you find yourself with an urgent print deadline to hit, but Flickr or your internet connection is having a wobble that day.
• Even if you are good at backing up your computer, it’s easy to end up with a Flickr account where photos have been uploaded by several different people and/or from several different computers and cameras. It’s only if you’ve got one backup of your Flickr photos that you’ll have everything in one convenient place for that panic moment when you need it.

FlickrEdit

So how do you do a backup? There are lots of free tools which let you download a batch of photos, but for backup purposes you really need something which lets you do “incremental” backups (i.e. just add the photos which are new since your last backup). Otherwise you quickly end up with having to do very large and slow backups each time.

Enter stage left, FlickrEdit (for Windows machines), freely available from http://sunkencity.org/flickredit.

Installation is pretty simply – click the orange button and follow your nose. The installation may need to add Sun’s Java platform to your machine too.

When it is installed, click “Login” in the top right to connect to a Flickr account, followed by “New user”. As part of this process, you may be taken to your web browser and prompted to log in to your Flickr account in order to authorise the software having access to it.

Once that’s all done, you can start backing up: go to the “All sets” tab, tick the sets you want to backup and click “Backup selected” in the bottom-right. To make it an incremental backup, go to File / Preferences.

Other Flickr backup packages

If you search the internet for other backup options, you still find plenty of references to FlickrBackup. This is the old name for FlickrEdit. The other package that often gets mentioned is Downloadr. Personally, I’m not a fan of it as I think it isn’t very user-friendly for non-IT literate users. It’s not that it takes many mouse clicks to do things, just that the flow and labelling of setps through the software doesn’t seem that helpful to me.

But I don’t use Windows!

For Linux users I’d recommend you look at flickrfs. For Apple users, there are several tools that let you download a whole set of photos, but I’ve not come across one that lets you backup photos new since your last backup. Do post up a comment if you know better.