If you have a bunch of photos stored on social photo hosting site Flickr, you’re going to want to sign in as soon as possible. Starting today, Flickr will start mass deleting photos from the site. The move comes shortly after Flickr was purchased from Yahoo in 2018 by the photo-sharing site you’ve never heard of, SmugMug.
Previously, users were given one terabyte of free media storage, but on February 5th users of Flickr’s free-tier will now only be allowed to store 1,000 photos and videos.
That means if all your middle school, high school, and college memories have been carefully stored away in your Flickr, so as not to eat up valuable hard drive space, they’re about to start getting shredded until your account is left with a trim one thousand. You can, if you’re insane, pay Flickr $50 a year for unlimited storage space, but when external hard drives and cloud-based storage services are either cheaper or more functional, why would you?
How To Save Your Photos From Flickr
Hopefully, your Flickr isn’t packed with tens-of-thousands of photos, if it is, consider this what you’re going to be doing tonight. SmugMug didn’t make downloading your photos very convenient, they could’ve just created a “download all” button, but they want you to give in to that $50 price tag.
If you’re an organized person that trait is really going to pay off here. You can easily download your photo sets as albums. Simply,
- Log in to Flickr, hover over the “You” section.
- Click on “Albums” and you’ll find a download button in the corner of every album.
- Click on that and create a zip file of your photos and you’re golden.
Yes, you’ll have to do this for every album, but it’s a hell of a lot easier than if you’ve been uploading photos with reckless abandon and zero organization.
If you’re not an organized person, we’re very sorry. You can download your photos from the Camera Roll section of your Flickr account in groups of 500 but you’ll have to manually select every photo. There is a “select all” option per date, but if space really is a concern you’re not going to want to keep all of those ancient selfies, which will make this task a hassle.
1. Log in to Flickr and hover over the “You” section.
2. Click on “Camera Roll” and start selecting!
For a certain generation of internet users, Flickr was a sort of proto-Instagram. It wasn’t always easy to do something as simple as upload a photo to the internet. The early ’00s were dark times, and Flickr made them just a little brighter. Shouts to the old school!