Flickr used to be a great home for all your photos; a place to save, collect, and share all your images easily and for free.
Not anymore, because Yahoo just made its Auto-Uploadr tool a premium feature. The Auto-Uploadr is a desktop app Flickr launched last year that takes every photo on your computer, your external hard drives, your SD cards from your camera, or in Dropbox or iCloud, and uploads them into one central, searchable library. Sounds great! And what a convenience for fans of the photo storage site. But Auto-Uploadr is no longer free software. With this change, you have to pay either $6 a month or $50 a year to use it.
That's fine, if you've got the cash. And you can still upload photos manually through the browser, which is a mind-numbing and tedious drag-and-drop process that costs nothing. However, there are several online photo storage services that are not only free, but also allow you to upload all of your photos---every picture you take, on every device---automatically. Never once do you have to remember to sync your photos. No dragging, no dropping. The hard math says that one of those services that offers an effortless way to archive everything is a better home for your pictures.
So maybe now is the time to pull your images off Flickr, and move on over to, oh I don't know, say, Google Photos? (Definitely go to Google Photos.)
It actually used to be really difficult to get your photos off Flickr en masse, but as of a year ago, the service added a bulk downloader. You head to your camera roll, highlight the photos and videos you want, and Flickr will spit out a Zip file. Flickr says this function allows you to "download thousands of photos and videos at once," but declines to say exactly how many you can grab. You can also download an album at a time, as well.
What next? Google Photos is arguably your best option. Many of us are already rocking Gmail accounts and using Drive to share things, so it's an obvious storage choice. Uploading is easy, and the app has a bevy of features you can use (or entirely ignore if storage is the only thing you're interested in). The auto-update feature of Google Photos keeps every picture from each of your devices backed up, and its image recognition engine automatically labels the photos based on their contents, so every picture is easily searchable. The technology is first-rate. Google's free service does limit the resolution of your photos to 16 megapixels, but for most people (especially those who mostly shoot with their phoness) this isn't a problem.
If this whole thing has made you distrustful of cloud-based services and the power they wield over your content, you're absolutely thinking clearly. You should also be backing everything up on physical storage.
The G-Drive mobiles USB-C is a portable hard drive that looks like it could fit in your wallet (it can't, but that's how slim it is!) and is a tiny bit more future-proof than your regular old external HD. It's a great back up option for your photos---it can hold up to a terabyte of them.
But maybe you want something that has some element of easy photo-syncing. After all, the whole point here is to keep that easy "back up everything" feature. There are a couple of physical products that have such powers. One of them is Bevy, which is an external hard drive (very small; it sort of looks like a Roku) that pairs with an app so groups can instantly share photos and save them to the drive. The Bevy comes with one or two terabytes of storage ($299 and $349, respectively). The device connects to your home Wi-Fi, and then users can connect to it via Bluetooth without passwords or user names. You decide who has access, and you can set up guest accounts that stop working once the person has left your home. It has HDMI output too, so you can connect it to your TV and slideshow away.
Another similar device is Lyve, which takes photos (up to 2TB) scattered across devices and groups them onto its hard drive. The drive has a built-in touchscreen; use it to swipe through the photos stored within. The Lyve app makes it easy to manage---anything on your phones can immediately and easily be pushed over to the device. Both Bevy and Lyve have SD card slots, so you aren't just limited to uploading photos from mobiles devices. All those high-quality DSLR shots are welcome, too.
Of course you're welcome to just keep your photos on Flickr and pay that premium price. Managing your own content the way that makes sense to you is what's most important. But if your faith in the service (or its parent company) is even slightly wavering, consider a switch.
