How To Upload Photos From Apple Photo To Flickr

Sometimes it seems as though all expert things — well, all free things — must come to an end, at least as far as cyberspace services are concerned. In this case, nosotros're talking about Flickr, one of the virtually popular gratis photo storage services. The service was purchased past professional photograph hosting service SmugMug, and final Nov announced that gratuitous users will be limited to ane,000 photos rather than their previous 1TB of storage.

According to Flickr's web log, as of Jan 8th, 2019, users who have more than i,000 photos in their accounts were no longer able to upload additional files. Worse, every bit of February 5th, whatever photos over the 1,000 limit "will exist at risk of deletion," beginning with your oldest photos. (Note: According to United states Today, Flickr is now saying it has extended the deletion deadline until March 12th.)

Want to avoid losing those photos? Flickr hopes y'all will decide to upgrade to Flickr Pro, which costs $5.99 a month (or $4.17 a month if you pay annually). Just if you lot want to stay with the free plan, and accept over 1,000 photos, you're going to want to motility all your photos to a different service, such as Google Photos.

In that location are 2 ways to download your photos, and which you'd adopt depends on how much info you've been putting into Flickr.

Download only the photos

If y'all but desire the photos, in that location are several relatively simple ways to do information technology (merely brand sure you take enough room on your hard drive first). Any process begins, of course, past signing into your Flickr account and heading to your Photostream.

First, yous can select photos from the Camera Curl tab. Flickr lets you organize your photos either past engagement taken or date uploaded; choose the easiest for you. Then run down the listing and click on "Select all" for each date that has photos y'all want to download. (If you want to download all of them, click on the top photo, hold down the Shift central, move down to the last photo and click on that.) Then move your cursor down to the bottom of the window; a pop-upwards card volition include a choice to Download. Click on "Create nix file."

At that place is a catch, however: Flickr only lets you download 500 photos at a time.

If you want to download more than that, you lot have a couple of options. According to a Flickr Help file recommended earlier this year, you tin can download up to 5,000 photos at a time from a unmarried album. Withal, in several threads in Flickr'south Assistance Forum, many users reported bug with these mass downloads, and suggested keeping album downloads to 500 photos too. Click on the Albums tab, hover the cursor over the anthology you desire to download and click on the "down" arrow. Flickr will then offer to download the anthology every bit a zip file; merely click on "Create zip file."

Flickr Camera Roll — *You can select photos from the Camera Roll tab to download; that way, y'all tin can pull out only your older photos.*

Download photos and info as well

If you would rather only download everything at once — and besides go all the metadata, comments, and GPS information that accompany the photos — and so information technology gets more complex. Click on your avatar icon in the upper right corner of the page, and select Settings. At the bottom of the Settings page, in that location will be a large push labeled "Request my Flickr information." The message above it specifies which email address the link to your data will be mailed to; you can change that if you need to. One time you've clicked the button, the bulletin will change to "Flickr data requested."

Flickr download — *The bottom right-hand button will be labeled "Request my Flickr data" until you click information technology.*

It will take a while. I had an old Flickr business relationship with hardly anything in it, so I substantially only had to download 13 photos. I hit the button at about 11:30AM and it was ready to go in almost 15 minutes. (Users with considerably heftier file numbers have reported much longer times — one who had about 13,000 photos said it took 4 days.)

Don't expect to get your photos accompanied by their data — photos and info will arrive separately. The nothing files belongings your photos volition comprise upwardly to 500 photos each, and so you may take a lot of downloading ahead of you.

The data will come in a zipped serial of files in a format called JSON. JSON is relatively unproblematic to read; you can use a simple text editor to meet all your information, including comments. Nonetheless, while you'll have the info safe, you won't exist able to easily transfer it to some other service, such as Google Photos.

*Your Flickr data volition exist downloaded to you every bit JSON files.*

If y'all're ambitious, you can try using a metadata tool such as Phil Harvey'south ExifTool to reunite your information with the corresponding photos. You could as well try an app such equally IFTTT, which has several tools to, for example, move tagged photos from Flickr to a service such as 500px. And if you don't want to carp doing any of it yourself, Flickr lists several tools on its site that purport to make the downloading procedure easier and / or faster. (One of our staff members successfully used an open-source tool chosen flickr downloadr.)

In one case you've retrieved your photos, y'all can upload them to another service, such as Google Photos, 500px, Photobucket, or DeviantArt. Think that unless you've been able to join your information with the associated photos, you'll only exist able to upload the photos and not the metadata, such as location or associated comments, since none of those services offer whatsoever kind of specialized upload from Flickr. (And keep in mind that if any of those deleted photos were linked to, those links volition be cleaved, so you may have to do some repair work.)

Simply while yous may lose your Flickr comments, you will accept saved your photos — at least, those older photos that are in danger of being deleted.

Update February seventh, 7:00AM ET: Changed to reverberate the extended borderline of March 12th.