Flickr As A Photo Backup Part One, Get Started

Get your ducks in a row and back up your photos, at least one copy, somewhere sort of safe! Start today for free!

I have an old Flickr.com account that I haven’t used in a while, but a few years ago I set up a second one I keep private just as a backup of pretty much every photo I shoot. It’s not my only backup, but it is offsite, spacious and free. Why wouldn’t I do it? Well, if it took a lot of time, right? Here’s how I do it so it doesn’t take a lot of time.

First: Flickr offers free accounts with ONE TERABYTE of photo storage. And this then makes it easy to share your photos online. But they don’t require that and there are some good privacy settings. Although Yahoo has has some leaking password issues, so use a good password and change it every so often. Good advice for everywhere.

SIDENOTE: My post on the free Lastpass password management tool.
It’s free, or for a buck a month you get some nice additional features.
Just click here to get it and decide for yourself.

Now back to Flickr: to backup my folders in an efficient way I use an app called FlickrSync which I got free from https://flickrsync.codeplex.com/ and though it hasn’t been updated in a while but still works.

I set the DEFAULT for the FlickrSync app to add them privately; I don’t want to have to change it every time or forget to change it; I do try to confirm that every time. Also I have it set to never delete images. If I create a duplicate in a different folder or with a rename, I can catch it on Flickr later — I don’t want to automatically delete things without human intervention. I would rather have a second copy than none at all.

Only one user on the account; that’s me. Maybe I will share with my wife someday, but she can see them when we are at home and doesn’t look for a five-year-old photo on her phone during a discussion just to punctuate a discussion. She’s a fine, patient woman.

One of the things I like is when I have synced, I just close it, and when I reopen it it remembers what I had checked the the last time, so I can pick up where I left off, a week or months later.

If I resync a folder that has pictures, it will add any new ones and not worry about the others (probably takes a little longer comparing, so I do uncheck them as I go if there is not going to be anything new in them.) Since I sort by months that’s pretty straightforward.

I do have a 2016phone folder though, where I have offloaded all my phone pictures, sometimes it’s broken into folders of a few months at a time: that one I leave checked through the year and it keeps it up to date.

Occasionally there are errors or photos it doesn’t want to upload. I retry, and sometimes that works. Other times I discover the files are huge and I don’t want to upload them. (Often I will create a quick JPG of these just to have some version of the backup in place, that’s the point after all.)

For these problem files you can temporarily move them from the folder and back or rename the extension. I have also had luck trying the Flickr embedded web uploader for the tricky one and then the rest of the folder can be uploaded since it skips the existing image. But sometimes Flickr just doesn’t like the file.

I’ll continue this FlickrSync backup discussion in future posts, where I’ll detail my process and do some experimenting, which I like to do with complicated things to improve my understanding and confidence in what I am working with.

Please bookmark, subscribe or follow me to tag along! Thanks!

—– David

P.S. My loose candid photos usually end up on my megawatson.tumblr.com page, alongside observations, comments and other amusements. Back when I had a LG flip phone and was a stay-at-home dad, I briefly fed a Flickr page, but also the late, lamented PicasaWeb, even before Google bought it. It’s been folded into Google Photos, with some better features but poorer ability to organize and manage, in my opinion. I put an event on Flickr a while ago to share with the organizers and participants, but I haven’t made time to curate a feed for it, and don’t want to simply duplicate the same stuff everywhere. Tumblr tends to be the big feed for user convenience, but even that doesn’t currently get all these Creative Upload posts.

P.P.S. Check out my other blogs on this here: (links to come after the posts do!)

Flickr As A Photo Backup Part One, Get Started (this one)