I’ve been a loyal Flickr user since early 2007, and a Flickr Pro user since June of the same year. So far, I’ve spent $124.75 being a member of the photo sharing site, and it’s been worth it, until now.

I’m jumping ship from Flickr to Picasa for a multitude of reasons, the final straw was Google+, the new social network / communication platform from Google that is heavily integrated into Gmail, Google Calendar, and (most importantly) my Android device.

If you’ve ever read anything about tech that I’ve written, outside of my rants against Apple, you’ll know one thing about me over all others – Integration and Seamlessness are at the tippy-top of my priority list when it comes to dealing with computers. I can’t stand doing things twice if I can help it, and will often spend more time finding an optimized solution than it would take to just do said “thing” twice. It’s just how I operate.

The Migration: Flickr

The question that needed to be answered, “How do I get all my photos off Flickr?”. Turns out it’s actually really easy. The very first thing to do is log into Flickr, and go to “Organize & Create”, choose “Your sets & collections”:

1. Create new set
2. Name it whatever
3. Select all your photos
4. Drop them into the new set
5. Save

Now, you don’t have to concatenate all your photos into one set, but like I said before – I hate doing things twice, so step one for me – get my photos from Flickr (all at once).

The Export: FlickandShare

There was a post on Google+, this post actually, on Kim Sherrell‘s feed by Jose Raposo – inspiring isn’t it? So much so, it prompted a how-to post while I do it. So here goes:

1. Browse to http://www.flickandshare.com
2. Authorize your Flickr account & browse through to your photo sets
3. You should see the set you created with all your photos in it
4. Click “Share”
5. At the very bottom of the thumbnail list is a “Get your Share Link”
6. Click that… then Click “Open it”
7. the “Download the set”; in the bottom left there.

Now, you need Java (they apologize for that) to do the download, I understand that – I’m on photo number 998 of 1289 and it’s still chugging along without any problem, so whatever – they can you CGI scripts for all I care, as long as it works.

The Convert: Import to Picasa

I’m using the desktop application for Picasa to do the uploads, figured it’s the fastest – probably mot robust way to get it handled.

1. Browse to your Flickr export folder
2. Sift through it and take out the crap you don’t want to upload – I took this opportunity to prune; downloaded 1289 photos, only uploading 547.
3. Select all > Upload
4. To keep this off of Google+ for a minute, I made the Album on the web interface and set it to “Only Me” for viewing. No sense flooding a stream with photos people have already seen or that are … 4 years old.

That’s it. I’m going to stay busy for a minute organizing these into new sets and that’ll be that. When the opportunity to re-up my Flickr Pro comes up in a few weeks; I’m out. Mind you, I never vested much into the community on Flickr, so ditching it is easy – same for Facebook when the time comes… I plan on holding out for at least 3 months on Google+ before I do that kind of thing though.

07.4.11 • posted in: Technology