Totally Sweet Photos » flickr

Flickr is Not a Backup for Your Photos

Tom — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:54:58 +0000

If you have ever considered Flickr to be a way of backing up up your photos online, stop. In “You have to be fucking kidding, Yahoo!” paying Flickr member Mirco Wilhelm describes having his 5 year-old account irreversibly deleted by staff.

Flickr is a great place to show off photos, but not a place to trust their safety. Flickr’s community guidelines are extremely vague, with phrases such as “don’t be creepy” and “You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” Despite there being no explicit clarification as to what these guidelines actually mean, Flickr staff are notorious for quickly deleting member accounts both free and paid without warning, and citing those guidelines as reasoning.

The worst part about Flickr’s account deletion process is that all data is immediately and irreversibly removed. Access to a deleted account can be restored in some cases, but photos, comments, tags, contacts and all other associated data promptly vanish forever. Unfortunately for Wilhelm his 5 year Flickr history is gone for no other reason than someone pressed the wrong button.

Flickr staff member Zack Sheppard commented in their help forum that a feature to restore deleted accounts is development. That sounds good, but the site has been around since 2004 and the lack of a restoration feature is not a new criticism. Mirco Wilhelm’s nuked account is just the first highly publicized case in which there’s absolutely no denying of innocence from either side.

Flickr is the best social networking photography site on the Web. It has an immense membership of highly talented photographers. Getting your photos seen and browsing work by others whose skill you admire is incredibly easy. However Flickr is not a place to backup your photos. Your account can go up in smoke at any moment, and nothing can be recovered.

How to Find the Flickr Photo Page from a Static Image URL

Tom — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:12:06 +0000

I just found myself looking at a Flickr-hosted image and wanting to see the rest of the photographer’s work. Unfortunately all I had was the direct URL to the image’s location. On Flickr, these come in the following cryptic format:

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4056/4446028630_06ef71d202_b.jpg

Thanks to “How to find the original Flickr Photo URL and User from a Static Flickr Image URL/Permalink (My priceless Flickr Tip)“ by Bram Van Damme, retrieving the URL to the Flickr photo page and finding the photographer’s account was simple. Just take the number between the last forward slash and first underscore and tack it onto the end of this url:

http://www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=

Doing so will bring up the page on Flickr featuring the photo, the photographer’s info, and all the photo meta data.

FlickrSync: Synchronize Local Folders with Flickr

Tom — Mon, 11 May 2009 15:23:44 +0000

FlickrSync is a free Windows application that will synchronize the contents of a folder or set of folders on your computer with your Flickr account. It allows the user to define upload settings, create photos sets and define custom filters.

FlickrSync works one-way — photos are synced from your computer to Flickr, but not the other way around. You are able to define Flickr photo permissions, and synchronize according to dates, captions, file names and more. FlickrSync can operate on one specific folder or a set of folders, as well as synchronize all the contents of a folder including sub-folders.

Visit the FlickrSync website.

Link via “Flickr File Synchronization Software” by gHacks.net.