Fortunately, free programs and Web sites like Bulkr or make bulk downloading from Flickr a piece of cake.) If disaster ever strikes, you may be alarmed to discover that Flickr offers no way to download photos en masse - only one photo at a time. (Most photo software, like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom, can send pictures directly to Flickr, or you can upload huge batches using various free Mac or Windows apps.

Yahoo is giving you that backup space for nothing. An external drive for this purpose costs about $100 - and is worthless in case of fire or burglary. (Indeed, it’s easy to keep them private, or share them only with family or friends.) It’s now an excellent way simply to back them up. Flickr doesn’t compress photos, degrading their quality, the way Facebook does.įlickr, in other words, is no longer just a way to present photos to your admirers. And those are full resolution photos, too - the originals. That’s 70 times the free space of the next closest competitor, Google Drive. That’s enough room for about 600,000 typical photos, enough to last you the next couple of birthday parties, at least. That is an insane, historic, vast amount of space. First, the good news: Every free account holder gets one terabyte of storage. And good luck figuring out how to download a photo the process was so nonintuitive and buried, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit. It took a lot of clicking and experimenting to navigate. It seemed to display your pictures in only two sizes: tiny square thumbnails (which made no sense - how many photos are perfectly square?) and full size. Second, Flickr was ugly, cramped and baffling. The $25-a-year Pro account offered unlimited space. First, the free account permitted you to display only your 200 most recent photos. It’s a place to study photography, to applaud good work by fellow camera buffs, to back up all those precious JPEGs, and to post a photographic record of weddings, vacations and other achievements for friends and families to enjoy.įlickr was disappointing, however, for two reasons. Its central concept was cool and useful: It’s an online gallery of everyone’s photographs that the whole world can search, annotate and admire. Take Flickr, for example, the Web site that Yahoo bought in 2005. If you ever want to see just how much whining a million Interneters can produce, try giving them something wonderful at no charge.

Flickr account cost