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Jan. 20th, 2013 02:45 amI spent the day backing up my Flickr today.
I realize that sounds really tedious and boring and it was really tedious and boring but when it was finished, I was really happy about it. Sure it might have taken absolutely forever but it's done and everything is up on my SkyDrive.
The main reason I was so glad I was able to back up my pictures is because after my first year year with a pro Flickr account, I decided not to renew my subscription. And with Flickr, you can store as many pictures as you want and they stay on the server so people have access to them (and if you posted them to places, they'll still show up) but if you look in your account, they only show the last 200 pictures you've uploaded so the bulk of it is inaccessible unless you have the direct link to them. And who keeps those around?
And of course, I've lost a lot of pictures over the years. Some were on various external hard drives, different computers and laptops and it's never really been consolidated in one place outside of Flickr. And even then, I don't post all of my pictures, only the ones that are decent enough not to suck. So it's just all the good pictures I've had the foresight to post. And I know I've lost pictures through various factory resets and dead laptops. So the closest thing I have to a complete picture collection is on my Flickr account, the same one where I hadn't been able to access the bulk of for the last five years.
But then Flickr decided to give all of its users three months of pro for free for the holidays so for a limited time, I can go and download all of my pictures and finally get copies of them all. And you would think that isn't that so hard but it's surprisingly hard to batch download pictures from Flickr... There's no way to do it through Flickr outside of downloading each picture one by one. I had over 3000 images, that wasn't going to happen. And I wanted to preserve my sets instead of having it all a mess together.
The third party application of choice seems to be Bulkr but apparently you can't get the original files and you can't download the images in their sets without having a pro license. And for the life of me, my Google-fu failed to find a keygen or a serial number to crack it with so that was out. But then I found Flick and Share which gets me the original files and while I had to go and individual download each set and couldn't have just set it to download all the sets at once with them all nicely filed, it was still worth it.
And then I figured I should go and backup all the files I now have saved on my laptop. While I could put them on an external hard drive, I'd been wanting to find more ways to use my various cloud drives. I have 25 GB with SkyDrive and The Box, 18.36 GB with Dropbox, and 5 GB with Google Drive and Amazon's Cloud Drive. I ended up choosing SkyDrive simply because I had a ton of space there since I hadn't used any of it yet and because I have a Windows 8 laptop, SkyDrive is basically all set up so I could just simply sync all my folders. Sure, I had to move all my folders to my SkyDrive Picture folder but that's okay. It's only a back up after all... I'm telling myself that because I'm insane and anal and organization of my folders is very important to me. So yeah, it's annoying me but I'm trying to be okay with it. If I tell myself that long enough, I'll start to believe it.
I realize that sounds really tedious and boring and it was really tedious and boring but when it was finished, I was really happy about it. Sure it might have taken absolutely forever but it's done and everything is up on my SkyDrive.
The main reason I was so glad I was able to back up my pictures is because after my first year year with a pro Flickr account, I decided not to renew my subscription. And with Flickr, you can store as many pictures as you want and they stay on the server so people have access to them (and if you posted them to places, they'll still show up) but if you look in your account, they only show the last 200 pictures you've uploaded so the bulk of it is inaccessible unless you have the direct link to them. And who keeps those around?
And of course, I've lost a lot of pictures over the years. Some were on various external hard drives, different computers and laptops and it's never really been consolidated in one place outside of Flickr. And even then, I don't post all of my pictures, only the ones that are decent enough not to suck. So it's just all the good pictures I've had the foresight to post. And I know I've lost pictures through various factory resets and dead laptops. So the closest thing I have to a complete picture collection is on my Flickr account, the same one where I hadn't been able to access the bulk of for the last five years.
But then Flickr decided to give all of its users three months of pro for free for the holidays so for a limited time, I can go and download all of my pictures and finally get copies of them all. And you would think that isn't that so hard but it's surprisingly hard to batch download pictures from Flickr... There's no way to do it through Flickr outside of downloading each picture one by one. I had over 3000 images, that wasn't going to happen. And I wanted to preserve my sets instead of having it all a mess together.
The third party application of choice seems to be Bulkr but apparently you can't get the original files and you can't download the images in their sets without having a pro license. And for the life of me, my Google-fu failed to find a keygen or a serial number to crack it with so that was out. But then I found Flick and Share which gets me the original files and while I had to go and individual download each set and couldn't have just set it to download all the sets at once with them all nicely filed, it was still worth it.
And then I figured I should go and backup all the files I now have saved on my laptop. While I could put them on an external hard drive, I'd been wanting to find more ways to use my various cloud drives. I have 25 GB with SkyDrive and The Box, 18.36 GB with Dropbox, and 5 GB with Google Drive and Amazon's Cloud Drive. I ended up choosing SkyDrive simply because I had a ton of space there since I hadn't used any of it yet and because I have a Windows 8 laptop, SkyDrive is basically all set up so I could just simply sync all my folders. Sure, I had to move all my folders to my SkyDrive Picture folder but that's okay. It's only a back up after all... I'm telling myself that because I'm insane and anal and organization of my folders is very important to me. So yeah, it's annoying me but I'm trying to be okay with it. If I tell myself that long enough, I'll start to believe it.
