Backing up iPhoto to Flickr  ⚐

Ever since Flickr upgraded to their 1TB plan, I’ve been looking for a good way to backup my photos there. Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this Github repo, which has a bit of AppleScript to get your photos and albums from iPhoto, then sets about uploading them to Flickr.

Even better, it keeps track of what it’s already uploaded, so you can run it every time you add some photos to iPhoto, so you’ll have a solid backup.

For me, this solves a lot of problems:

• One, I like having my photos backed up. I think this will be my seventh photo backup, which makes me at least feel pretty good that a bad disk or virus or malware won’t eat all my photos.
• Two, it solves the “how do I keep a lot of photos on my phone” issue.

That latter solution is a big one. iOS still has a pretty bad solution for managing photos, particularly doing it wirelessly. Syncing photos is still over a cable, so I’ve moved to using Photo Stream as a way to get photos off my camera, as imperfect as that is. But that means the photo albums on my phone never get updated, as they only get updated when you sync via USB.

Now, I can use the Flickr app (as long as I’ve got some sort of internet access) and have access to every single one of my photos going back to when I first got a digital camera (Christmas of 1999). That’s pretty awesome. And they don’t take up any space on my phone. Even better.

There’s some little downsides and gotchas. If you’ve already uploaded anything to Flickr, you’re going to end up with duplicates (at least I’m pretty sure you are—I’ll know when my upload finishes). That’s pretty easy to clean up though. I’ve noticed some photos getting uploaded in the wrong orientation. That’ll take a little while to go through and adjust, but hey, easy enough to scan through albums and rotate some images.

Once done, I’ll have 15 years of images available to me at pretty much any time. I can add comments or descriptions and search on those, or browse albums. Flickr’s new app is pretty nice, and not a bad way to view photos on the go.