FlickrBackup: A must have for any Flickr user.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 02/21/08 at 12:02:43 pm

The way I see it, there are 2 different kinds of uses for web based photo sharing services like Flickr and Picasa Web Albums. The first is casual usage where you just sort of upload whatever photos you happen to take on a given day with no real structure or quality control. The 2nd way is sharing and archiving your photos where the service, in this case Flickr, is your only organized-centralized-source for all of your pictures.

I’ve been slowly merging to the latter and this week I think that process has been completed. I have uploaded everything to Flickr, family photos, vacation photos, photos I take for insurance purposes you name it. Since I have moved everything to Flickr I have been utilizing the permissions features for the first time too. I don’t want the general public to have access to family pictures so I can restrict the photos to my family only. Other photos I might just want friends to see and I can restrict those too, simple.

In fact there is only one problem with archiving everything on a single system and that’s redundancy. I don’t think I could ever trust an online service with something so important… I mean what if Flickr were to suddenly shut down one day? Or there was some major crash and somehow there was permanent data loss?! It could never happen, it never has, but for some people like myself that’s still not a risk we’re willing to take. I needed a way to back up all of my photos on Flickr and at least keep my photoset structures in-tact. Automatic backups would be cool but I think even semi-monthly manual backups would be sufficient.

My search quickly came to an end when I stumbled upon an application that can do all of the above and it’s appropriately called FlickrBackup. FlickrBackup is a Java powered, open source application that allows you to back up your entire Flickr library with just a couple clicks. By default the software will keep your sets together by putting each set into its own folder. It also allows you to keep the photo’s name and EXIF data in-tact for a seamless restoration if needed. Additionally, FlickrBackup has a sister plug-in called FlickrEdit which is very similar to the new Uploadr application. It allows you to easily make quick changes, upload and restore your photos onto Flickr. Best of all because it’s all open source software it’s completely free for personal use.

Now I can rest easy knowing that all of my photos are backed up onto my home file server… and maybe backed up again on a mirrored secondary drive. There’s no such thing as overkill.

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