I've been a Flickr user since January 2006, with 84,229 photos.
As anyone who's been around Flickr during that same time period will know, it's gone through multiple changes of ownership, and supposedly improves to the technology (I can't say I've noticed anything "above the hood" if you see what I mean!)
So, at least I decided to bite the bullet and try to transfer everything to Apple Photo. While I was at it, I wanted to move everything from F**ebook too.
I thought my experience might be useful to other people making the move.
Firstly, after extensive internet research I came across a bit of software called PicBackMan and thought this might be the solution. Despite numerous attempts (and paying for the software), running on Mac OS X and Windows (using Parallels) I couldn't get it to pick up all 84k worth of photos.
In the last week or so, quite by chance, I came across gallery-dl (see gallery-dl). It's command-line driven rather than a GUI, but to be honest for a one-off exercise I can live with that. You need to be quite tech-savvy to figure out the configuration (the website has lots of examples thankfully). As you'll see, gallery-dl is able to work with a very extensive list of photo hosting sites (excluding F**ebook). With the latter, I've downloaded everything to Dropbox (the transfer is built into F**ebook) and will then upload to Apple Photo.
So, once I got the configuration sorted, I downloaded everything to my MacBook Air M1 (1TB local storage certainly helps!) and after a few days/nights, it uploaded everything to iCloud - very glad for a relatively fast (324Mbps D/L, 9.69 Mbps U/L) fibre broadband connection here in the UK.
When it comes to albums that you create in Flickr, on balance I would be inclined to include them in the structure of the download - rather than just a single folder with every photo in it. It only occurred to me part way through that you can have the same photo in more than one album, so I was expecting lots of duplicates - so far, however, it's just 335 (they show in the album view of the photo app, and they're easy to delete). I could never get on with albums in Flickr so they're all a bit of a mess but at least they'll help me remember locations, events, etc.
It's going to take some sorting out in Apple Photos. However, I'm already seeing some of the benefits - everything neatly categorised by years, months and days - and the 'memories' feature (presumably using AI/ML) is great fun.
Before finally hitting cancel on Flickr I'm going to try and make sure everything is there and may do another download, but very glad I've made the move after years of contemplating it!
As anyone who's been around Flickr during that same time period will know, it's gone through multiple changes of ownership, and supposedly improves to the technology (I can't say I've noticed anything "above the hood" if you see what I mean!)
So, at least I decided to bite the bullet and try to transfer everything to Apple Photo. While I was at it, I wanted to move everything from F**ebook too.
I thought my experience might be useful to other people making the move.
Firstly, after extensive internet research I came across a bit of software called PicBackMan and thought this might be the solution. Despite numerous attempts (and paying for the software), running on Mac OS X and Windows (using Parallels) I couldn't get it to pick up all 84k worth of photos.
In the last week or so, quite by chance, I came across gallery-dl (see gallery-dl). It's command-line driven rather than a GUI, but to be honest for a one-off exercise I can live with that. You need to be quite tech-savvy to figure out the configuration (the website has lots of examples thankfully). As you'll see, gallery-dl is able to work with a very extensive list of photo hosting sites (excluding F**ebook). With the latter, I've downloaded everything to Dropbox (the transfer is built into F**ebook) and will then upload to Apple Photo.
So, once I got the configuration sorted, I downloaded everything to my MacBook Air M1 (1TB local storage certainly helps!) and after a few days/nights, it uploaded everything to iCloud - very glad for a relatively fast (324Mbps D/L, 9.69 Mbps U/L) fibre broadband connection here in the UK.
When it comes to albums that you create in Flickr, on balance I would be inclined to include them in the structure of the download - rather than just a single folder with every photo in it. It only occurred to me part way through that you can have the same photo in more than one album, so I was expecting lots of duplicates - so far, however, it's just 335 (they show in the album view of the photo app, and they're easy to delete). I could never get on with albums in Flickr so they're all a bit of a mess but at least they'll help me remember locations, events, etc.
It's going to take some sorting out in Apple Photos. However, I'm already seeing some of the benefits - everything neatly categorised by years, months and days - and the 'memories' feature (presumably using AI/ML) is great fun.
Before finally hitting cancel on Flickr I'm going to try and make sure everything is there and may do another download, but very glad I've made the move after years of contemplating it!
Last edited:
