Uploading your pictures to the Internet is a great idea. They’re safe, and with things like Flickr, you can have all sorts of fun with them and make them a whole lot more useful.
But what if I had a double hard disk crash today?
That’s all of my images, gone. Even the ‘bad’ ones which I didn’t upload (because they weren’t any good, but I saved them anyway).
Flickr, in what I consider quite a selfish act, provides no easy way of downloading your images safely, with all the meta data and everything like that, to your hard drive.
I think this is quite a shame, because something like this would really extend the service from ’sharing’. It wouldn’t be hard to do, either.
In the meantime of course, there’s FlickrBackup.
You can order a CD/DVD with all your photos. It is not as cheap as I want it to be ($25.95 for first 1000, and $4 for each 1000 over), but a solution nonetheless. For a person, like myself, with over 1000 6MP SLR photos online the DVD solution is much more efficient than downloading. If Flickr came out a year or two earlier they would be dealing with nearly 10′000 3-6MP images from me, at least … I don’t even want to think about downloading that much data. Further more, there an issue of bandwidth that an online backup recovery solution like that would require and more than likely Flickr would charge extra for that … in which case DVD solution is better since you also get an instant hard copy.
Thanks for the link Phil - I’ll use that in a mo.
Alex, you have a good argument and I agree that DVD might be a better solution, but I think that price is silly. It costs nothing for a DVD, and very little to post it even internationally, so I wouldn’t even consider paying that.
You are correct, the bandwidth used might be phenomenal for some. So why not just take into account the bandwidth you get each month?
I hardly ever use that, and since I bought it I wouldn’t feel bad about using it in this way…
The only situation in which I would pay the price is if my photos get hosed. That is unlikely, but possible (weekly backup to external HD plus monthly backups to DVD and a “portable” external HD that I keep in the office … I am very paranoid about loosing my documents, as well as a lot of other things [I take a lot of my personal notes in kana]).
Regardless, I have to agree that the price is somewhat ridiculous. The process is likely completely automated and its only function is data recovery (Why would you order a DVD with your photos if you can easily make a copy yourself, for “free”?). I suppose it will come down with time. I am just glad they finally got around to offering the service.
You are only allowed 1Gb a month. I never actually approached that limit (my highest was around 700Mb or so) but it will be easily surpassed by most users if downloading complete archive is taken out of your monthly bandwidth allowance. Hence the reason why I am not going to upload my back archive to Flickr … it will take me about 6 months since the monthly allowance can be exceeded.
I’m developing a downloading tool for Flickr photos. Hope to release it in few weeks to come.
Catus
Great Catus - keep us informed!
i’m looking for a service which burns my flickr-pictures on a dvd, but i keep finding the same old links which all don’t offer such a service. is there a service which burns flickr pictures in the original format (plus metadata if possible) on dvds?