Flickr Backup
For a while I’ve been worried about being able to get all my photos back off Flickr (and securely onto a DVD which I can safely lose, snap or keep in a box that my grandchildren will open in 50 years time to discover a circle of dust). I know I can write a program (my choice of language: Java) to retrieve and store them, but I’ve never got round to it.
So last night I typed “Flickr backup” into Google and found a program called… Flickr Backup. It’s almost everything I want, and there are a few particularly impressive things about it: it’s got a nice, clear user interface, it looks and feels like any other application on your desktop, it comes in executables for Windows and Mac, and all that is done in Java.
It also uses a feature of Flickr I’ve not seen before: the Flickr authentication API. This allows an application to acquire limited access rights to your photos. So I allowed Flickr Backup to read my photos, but not to write to my account or to delete photos. That access is controlled on an application-by-application basis through my account on the Flickr website. So I’m always in control via my Flickr account, not the application which I’ve not yet learned to trust fully.
I said it does almost everything I want. Photos seem to be all stored in one folder, whereas I’d prefer them to be in one folder per set. And I’d also like my titles, dates, descriptions, etc backed up, too. But that’s okay, because FB’s author, Andrew Serff, has done a great job so far and may well add those things in future. And if not, then I can always have a go myself and submit my changes — I think I’ll learn a lot from looking at the source.
So, thanks, Andrew, that’s a great product.
