Flickr recently updated its Web and mobile apps with features that make it one of the most compelling photo sharing and storage services available today. It is so good now that using its competitors would probably be a waste of money.
I’ve been using Flickr since about 2004 and, admittedly, I didn’t pay much attention to Flickr until recently. Until then it was a service I sometimes paid for (I opted for the paid Pro version for a few years for the additional storage) and then loosely used as a backup storage space for my photos. Three significant changes brought Flickr to the foreground as my primary photo storage and sharing service:
- All accounts being upgraded to 1TB for free,
- The updated and excellent Flickr Uploadr, and
- The most recent updates that just made Flickr so much more useful.
I have a lot of photos in my archive that go back over a decade. My photos are a growing record of our lives and experiences. When I look at the photos that have survived from my parents’ earlier years and from our ancestors, I see fewer and fewer visual records of earlier times and a relatively poor historical archive. Digital photos make it possible for us to create rich historical archives of our lives and to store those archives pretty inexpensively.
Granted digital also means we probably take way too many photos of stuff we don’t particularly need to document in quite so much detail but, on balance, I’d rather have a richer archive.
My journey
Anyway, I have used various combinations and solutions over the years to archive and share my growing photo library. I’ve used 500px (great service but I didn’t see the point in paying when I had Flickr for free), Dropbox (paid and free), Google Photos (including Google+ Photos), Google Drive, local external drives, Amazon S3 storage, iCloud and Flickr.
My current archive runs to about 128GB. It is derived from iPhoto library exports and edited photos from Lightroom. I don’t think it includes most of my RAW archives so that size will increase when I consolidate those archives fully. The first challenge with a photo library of more than a few gigabytes is that you have to start paying for storage and you have to decide between a variety of photo storage options and how you want to also share your photos.
What I did for a while (and still do to a degree) was to store my photos in a dedicated storage space and share more limited and selected collections on Facebook, Google+ and Dropbox. Actually, Dropbox doubled as a storage and sharing service so it is pretty useful but accommodating my collection means subscribing to the Pro Dropbox service at about $99 per year. That may not sound like much but I had to contend with a pretty hefty currency conversion rate at the time and it wasn’t the only paid storage service I was using.
I also don’t want to trust my collection to a service which could drop me without much notice because of a bug or policy change so its all about redundancy and managing costs overall. I started using Amazon’s S3 storage service a few years ago too. The cost of storage large amounts of data on Amazon’s servers is pretty low and considering that Dropbox uses S3 for its back-end, I didn’t see a lot of point in relying so heavily on Dropbox when I could just go to the source and upload all my data (including my photo archives) to S3 for longer term storage and use something else to share my photos. The challenge, for a few years, was uploading my massive archive to S3’s servers on South Africa’s very limited broadband plans and data transfer limits. It required a lot of patience so I basically uploaded bits and pieces over a few years to get started.
Along the way I also started using Google+ Photos to upload my archives. I subscribe to Google’s 100GB storage plan which became a lot more cost effective about 2 years ago when the price dropped to about $2 per month for 100GB. Coupled with Google+ Photos’ really good image recognition and the ability to find stuff easily, it didn’t matter that people never really caught on to Google+ as a primary social network. It was great for simple storage and personal reference. I still have a sizable chunk of my archive in Google+ Photos (about 45GB).
Dropbox and Google+ Photos introduced something which has become essential with so many devices being repositories for our photos: sync. These background sync services run on our desktops and mobile devices and aggregate our photos from these various sources in our cloud services. It is really useful because it means you don’t have to set aside time to backup or upload your photos. It just happens behind the scenes.
The challenge with Google+ Photos (and, more recently, Google Drive because they share the same storage capacity and are slowly become more integrated) is that I started to reach the 100GB limit and the next step up from there is 1TB for $9.99 per month. As much as I like using Google services, I’m not ready to hand over everything to Google either so I maintained my S3 backups and kept looking.
Back to Flickr
Flickr, a Yahoo! company, started to shake things up about 2 years ago when it announced a redesign and a new free storage option: 1TB. Yes, one terabyte of free storage, albeit with ads initially. You could pay $50 to remove ads and $500 to double your storage (that option always struck me as a “well, if they want to pay $500 to double their storage, what the heck!” option) but 1TB was (and remains) far more than any other free storage plan so I started uploading more of my library to Flickr even if it was more for personal storage.
I’ve had the Flickr apps on my devices for a while now and I’ve enabled the auto-upload feature almost since the beginning. That meant that Flickr has also been uploading photos from my devices to my Photostream in the background on and off for a couple years. A couple months ago, Flickr released a beta version of its new Uploadr app for Mac OS. The app basically watched folders I told it to watch (including my iPhoto library) and quietly and quickly uploaded my albums to my Photostream. Our connectivity here in Israel is pretty fast and unlimited so I just left my Mac to upload overnight over the course of a week or two and, eventually, my Flickr collection was complete.
The Uploadr worked even better than I thought. It organised my photos based on time-based metadata so my collection is organised chronologically. There is some duplication between albums I uploaded manually beforehand and the automatic uploads, at least where Uploadr didn’t realise they were duplicates. At the same time, Uploadr didn’t upload albums it recognised as duplicates and all the automatic uploads are marked as “Private” so they are only visible to me until I share them.
I love that I can selectively share photos within albums. I don’t like sharing photos of our kids publicly so I tend to create two albums where I have a photoset that includes photos of our kids and photos to share publicly. With Flickr, I can use one album and selectively share photos of our kids with Friends, Family or Friends and Family while others remain Public. The disadvantage here is that I have to designate contacts as Friends, Family or both for them to see the photos. That means those contacts need to be Flickr users and be logged in to see the photos. At least, that is generally the case.
I realised that the most recent updates include a very cool sharing option. It looks like I can use Flickr’s sharing tool to create a link that gives everyone who has the link the ability to see the photos I have shared (except for Private photos which remain hidden) even if they could not ordinarily see the photos if they just browsed to my Photostream.
So now you can easily upload, organize, and navigate your photos. But to what end? To share them of course! We’ve overhauled our sharing experience to make it lightweight and incredibly simple to use by bringing you bulk sharing! You no longer have to create an album in order to share a batch of photos. Simply swipe across your photos to select a few from your Camera Roll and click “Share.” You can grab the link, share via email, upload to Facebook, and more.
This is a great feature because it means I can share an album of photos of my family on Facebook with a subset of my Facebook friends without making the Flickr album Public just to facilitate that. At least I am pretty sure this is how it works. What this means for me is that I can really use my Flickr albums as my primary photo storage and sharing service and drastically reduce redundancy in my photo sharing processes.
Yet another update which doesn’t usually have as much sex appeal as the design stuff is a bulk download option. This is a big thing for me because it means that I have an exit option if Flickr ever stops working for me. I have over 86 000 photos in Flickr’s servers and I need to be able to get those out. Now I can:
No cloud home for your photos is complete without the ability to download them easily. For the first time, we’re bringing you bulk download. You can pick a selection of thousands of images from your Camera Roll and download them in zip format.
There are other enhancements which include improved image recognition and search capability, as well as a somewhat controversial auto-tagging feature. I suspect the bad results are a consequence of a system that is still learning. Google’s systems do this a lot better and it seems Flickr has a lot of catching up to do but, in the meantime, it is better than it was and I like the changes overall.
So, for now
For the time being, my workflow is much simpler. Uploadr automatically uploads my photos to Flickr when it notices exports from Lightroom. My exports actually go into a Dropbox folder but that is more of a temporary way-station for some ad hoc sharing until I am more comfortable with switching completely to Flickr for that or run out of space on Dropbox (I have 22GB of free space after a series of space bonuses). My longer archives are in my S3 buckets and I update those manually using Panic’s excellent Transmit app. I recently completed my archive upload to S3 so I have a complete copy of my photo archives along with other data in Amazon’s servers and it costs me around $16 a month (give or take).
I used to upload photos to Facebook to share with family and friends but I’ll just use Flickr sharing for now and see how that works. It seems to be a pretty effective option.
I’ll leave my photos in Google+ Photos. Google has its annual IO conference coming up this month and there is always the possibility they will announce some amazing update to Google+ Photos that will prompt a rethink. Even if they don’t, there is no big need to remove those photos from my Google storage spaces.
Between the Flickr apps on my iPhone and iPad and the Web view, Flickr has become a pretty complete photo management option for me. It is very easy to add new photos from different devices, share them with whomever I want to share them with and access them when I need them without needing a lot of storage space on my devices. It isn’t perfect and some apps and services do some of what Flickr does better than Flickr but, when I look at Flickr holistically, it is a winner.
You really should give Flickr another look if you are serious about your photos
Flickr isn’t the cool kid on today’s Web but it has a solid history and a great set of updates that make managing photos so much easier. The layouts are really clean and features like Magic View are fantastic. I get the feeling that these features are a little rough and will improve even more but they could really change your perspective on how you currently store and manage your photos.
Like TheNextWeb’s Amanda Connolly, Flickr has prompted me to all but abandon Apple’s Photos app as my primary local photo management tool. Photos is nice but it became a lot less relevant when I considered Apple’s iCloud storage plan pricing, the disadvantage of being locked into the iCloud ecosystem and Flickr becoming such a great primary photo storage and management option.
That said, Flickr’s Organizr could really use some updates (I’d like to have an option to dynamically create and update albums automatically based on tags or locations, for example). It works well enough for now though, especially considering it is free.
There are many really good photo sharing and/or storage services on the Web today and you have probably picked one (or a few) that work well for you. If you haven’t thought about Flickr for a while (or at all), you should take another look. You might find it has everything you need and more. Worst case, you receive a free 1TB for whatever you do decide to upload.
RSS – Posts
What do you think?