How to Download All My Flickr Photos at Once

1 TB of free Flickr is ending. I must follow this step to save all my precious photos of my children growing up.

In the early November of 2018, Flickr announced it will limit free accounts to 1000 photos or videos.

How many photos and videos do I have? 9437 photos and 2592 videos.

The photos date all the way back to the year 2003.

I am using only 10.6% of 1TB. They should be restricting based on storage space instead of photos quantity.

Anyway, I have been pondering whether to pay for the Pro version at $4.99 per month.

Right now, I am paying Vimeo monthly to store my videos, which I am pondering to move out from too.

Vimeo can store videos only. Flickr can store both photos and videos.

However I need more. I need storage for data files too like PDF, music, ISO, doc and more.

My money may be going to Dropbox or Google Drive or something similar. I will study and make a comparison first.

Right now, it is 17 January 2019, and I have 19 more days to salvage my photos from Flickr before 5 February 2019.

I have tried deleting photos and videos one by one, thinking I will shrink the number to 1000, but for over 10,000 photos, I think this will take days, or months, maybe years.

So how do I download all my photos and videos from Flickr at one go?

I can’t, but I can do it 5000 at a time…
http://osxdaily.com/2018/11/03/download-all-flickr-photos/

• Go to my Flickr account, click on “You” followed by “Albums”.
• Create an album of up to 5000 photos, then click “Download”.
• Choose “Create Zip File” and wait for it to arrive in the email.
  

10.6% of (1 terabyte) =106 gigabytes.

I don’t have enough space on my Macbook Pro now. Let me go to my home office and hook up an external hard drive.

Here’s what I did first.

1. Go to my Flickr account’s Camera Roll and Select all the photos from a single year starting with 2018 which already contains 2080 items. Then click “Add to Album”.

2. Select “Create New Album” and name it 2018.

It took more than 2 minutes for it to gather all the photos into the album.

3. Repeat the process year by year and groups of years.

It looks like I started using Flickr heavily since 2015, coz I managed to group the few items from 2003 to 2014.

So tomorrow I have 5 albums to download. 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2003-2014.

18 Jan 2019 update:

I downloaded the 2003-2014 album and it says “We’ll zip up these items and send you a FlickrMail with a link to download them when they are ready.”

So I downloaded another album. Then I got this error message “There was an error downloading this selection. Please try again.”. I tried downloading another album. Same error message.

Ok the email for the first download arrived. The email says “Your zip file of 1287 items is ready to download. Your zip file is ready! Click here to download your items. This zip file expires on January 25, 2019.”

The download begins. It is about 1.6GB for this batch.

According to Yahoo Help page, “you can download up to 500 files using the Camera Roll or up to 5000 files from an album at a time.”

But still no luck.

I noticed the rest of the error albums have videos in them. Anyway, let’s try creating half-yearly albums. Like “2015 Jan to Jun” (got through, only 2 videos). “2015 Jul to Dec” (error, 1327 photos, and 493 videos). There is a bulk of videos in Nov 2015 (Hokkaido Holiday with Stella). Let’s handle that separaelty. Now do “2015 Jul to Oct”.

One annoying note. The emails arrived without the album names, just a bunch of random folder names with all my photos and videos inside. So I have to figure out which timeline each group of photos and videos belong to. (Sigh!)

Ok this thing require full concentration. I got a shoot tomorrow (now is Friday 11pm) and a class on Monday to prepare. I might continue this on Wednesday, 23 Jan 2019. Still got time.

Update 6 Feb 2019.

Procrastinated till the last day. (US date is 5 Feb 2019)

Continued downloading… instead of creating albums, I downloaded in batches of 500 and less. 2015 Nov 1 to Nov 4 a & b, 2015 Nov 21 to Dec 13 a & b, 2015 Dec 14 to Dec 31, 2016 Jan 1 to Apr 30, 2016 May 1 to Jun 28, 2016 Jul 1 to Jul 31 a & b, 2016 Aug 1 to Sep 25, 2016 Sep 26 to Oct 14 a & b, 2016 Oct 15 to Oct 16, 2016 Oct 17 to Oct 30, 2016 Nov 1 to Dec 31, 2017 part 1 of 4, 2017 part 2 of 4, 2017 part 3 of 4, 2017 part 4 of 4, 2018 part 1 of 10, 2018 part 2 of 10, 2018 part 3 of 10, 2018 part 4 of 10, 2018 part 5 of 10, 2018 part 6 of 10, 2018 part 7 of 10, 2018 part 8 of 10, 2018 part 9 of 10, 2018 part 10 of 10.

DONE!

Goodbye Flickr. You have been good and still good. I just don’t want to part with my money every month just to hold my memories.

Update 7 Feb 2019.

Oh wait. It’s not over.

The downloaded media were in batches of zipped files

Some of the zipped files were corrupted hence cannot be extracted.

The zipped files are in an external Hard Disk Drive.

So I brought the drive over to a Windows laptop.

Wallah! The zipped files were extracted in a breeze.

So Windows are more versatile than Mac, I guess.

What next? Stay tuned for my progress update.

See you in the next one!

Adrian Lee
AdrianVideoImage.com