A long time ago—when I was trying to figure out what photo storage solution to bet on—I asked the flickr crew if there would be an easy way to ‘backup’ all of my flickr content; they assured me there would. Since then I’ve heard nothing more about any such thing. Today the answer came from outside of flickr. Now is it just me, or has flickr slowed down dramatically since Yahoo bought them?
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Well, that’s nice, but: I still have my pictures on my harddisk even if I upload them to Flickr.
The most important thing to backup would be the sets, tags and comments…
Not just you. When big corps buy out the smaller guys more often than not things change for the worse.
Hell, geocities wasn’t that bad of a host (as far as free hosts at the time) before yahoo! moved in. just my .02
I don’t have a “Pro”-Account on Flickr, so I can’t tell what it’s like with e.g. large uploads. But I still like it, it seems reasonable fast here (uploads were slow since the beginnings) and everything’s working fine…
In my opinion the slowdown (if there is one) has nothing to do with Yahoo! but with the extremly fast growing number of users (and photos).
I got to agree mith Nico : the fact that Yahoo! bought Flickr clearly increased its visibility and therefore the number of its users hence the (slight) slowdown thingy
You could always use zenphoto and back it up yourself you know. ;-)
Yeah, I know it’s got a ways to go in development, but if you’re really worried about flickr being slow and not backing up, well, it solves both those problems already…
It differs. Sometimes I don’t even think about the speed – which means it’s acceptable – and sometimes I make a cup of tea, a sandwich and a matchstick replica of the Eiffel tower while my pictures upload.
I think flickr is much too overrated. It’s got some cool ideas, but when it comes to sorting a huge number of pictures, it just isn’t too intuitive.
I was always a little worried about backup the content on Flickr as well, just in case they pulled some shaft-ola move one day. I found this .NET utility (beta right now) that will pull down FLickr images, and the author assured me he would release it again when the framework was finalized. It’s a M$ solution, but I’m glad to see that there’s an alternative
Looks like the comments did something to my comment too…
Well, what Nico said (about the meta-data being almost as important as the images themselves) is key. Heck, Michael, you might have as many comments on some of your flickr images as your blog entries! (like all those E3 shots)
The problem is, there’s no standard way to store or represent that meta-data. Even if you just got some straight DB or CSV-style text file dump of all the data, you’d have to convert it somehow.
On top of that, in some ways the value is even larger than your individual meta data – it’s your data and its place (via tags, groups, etc.) in the whole flickr community. Certainly not for every user or every image, but for many it is.
I use flickr now, and am pro, but this is exactly the argument i can’t battle when i try to convince my brother to make the move from smugmug. You can get a DVD backup of your photos from smugmug for $11. when Flickr has this, (and I’m waiting) he’ll move over his million galleries…
Well the issue isn’t so much that I want to revert from flickr—though that may also be the case. It’s more that I want to be able to retrieve my images, for whatever purpose, in a fast and easy manner.
The meta-data is key, but I’ll take one of the two over nothing.
And for the record, I do keep backups of 99.5% of the photos on flickr.
I’d love ‘my local flickr’ for BB.
I use Picasa and backup on to CD.
Why? Isn’t the whole sense of Flickr the community thing? When I first saw Flickr I wanted to write some kind of copycat for my website, just to have a nice photo gallery with tag support and JavaScript notes in photos. But I think Flickr is more. A “local flickr” would be no better than Gallery or zenphoto (which looks quite nice, btw, never heard of it before).
i think a lot of it could be just you.
Flickr has an open API. that’s the method by which the particular app (great catch, BTW) was created in the first place!
with an API, much of the creativity should be up to the development community.
in what ways do you think flickr has slowed down? or are you talking performance, and not speed of “innovation”?
perhaps my view is skewed, being on the API dev list (there are quite a few nice apps coming around) (oh this is weird can’t find the submit button…lets give a guess a shot)
Flickr is good. but i am experiencing some problems as micheal said. its slowed down .
I was speaking more in terms of features and wiz-bang stuff than in actual speed.
cool way and easy to backup flickr …
By the way, FlickrBlog mentions a list of Flickr Utilities, the Great Flickr Tools Collection.
I’d rather host my gallery myself on my website, preferbly something that integrates with WP and allows for both tagging and commenting.
I do have a flickr account, and I was given a pro account .. but I just don’t get the ‘community vibe’.
I remember seeing the Flickr forums with the same “we need a backup system” and they assured us that the pictures can be backed up. This was nearly a year ago, just before I purchased a pro account. As a precaution, I keep all the original copies of my images on my hard drive before posting them to Flickr.
As a pro account holder, I expected a backup system since they are hosting the original copies of the images themselves. Maybe even a little way to save in a text file, some of the comments/photo notes would be grand. I just hope Yahoo doesn’t force Flickr to change as a service and allow Ludicorp to continue developing. Otherwise I just might write my own for my site since I know everything can be saved.
yo theiggsta:
they are hosting the original copies of the images themselves
since when? you don’t have the originals on your hard drive? flickr hadn’t claimed to be a storage system, rather a way to share your photos.
the API was made available precisely for the creation of tools like the backup software!
i think an open API is a grand move, and allows flickr to focus on a few “pet” enhancements (their team is no where near ginormous enough to take on everything “you” want)
j.
I was amazed with Flickr when it first hit. I am a pro account holder and moved my galleries there. But the innovation has greatly slowed. They’re not even attempting to match features that other services (smugmug) add such as backups.
In addition, the actual speed has slowed greatly. It was never a zippy service, but recenlty it’s been slow enough to notice. I’m currently evaluationg Tristan’s ZenPhoto.
why not have your own gallery on your own server?
you know… it’S your photos and you help flickr make money of it by generating traffic tbhus increasing their exposure and they even charge you for it…
ultimately services like that are doomed to fail. it may take a few years though but eventually people with photos worth watching will realize this. If not, then all praise flickr or whatever the succeeeding product will be called.
I prefer to have my stuff on my own server, thank you.