Google plus es mucho mejor que Flickr por several reasonsFirst of all because the photos look better, also because its mobile application is much better, because of its community that is growing steadily, because its design is infinitely better, because it is free (I have been a paid user of Flickr for six years), because it controls privacy well and at the same time it has a lot of social features that Flickr lacks. And, why not to say it, I think that Flickr is going to go through the same thing as delicious, that its users are going to end up being left stranded.
Well, I offer you a tutorial to migrate from Flickr to Google plus and not lose any information from your photos, including metadata.
The image on the left is a screenshot of the information from a photo I uploaded to Google plus with this process and then downloaded again; as you can see, no data is lost.
I'm going to detail it a lot but you will need an intermediate level of geekiness, two or three free hours, Firefox, a good connection,...
Obviously, the first step is to download all your photos from Flickr, which in my case were 4,000; the option of FlickandShare It didn't work for me, there is another paid option under Adobe air - Bulkr - but I'm not willing to spend 30$ on a revolutionary tax, so I found a couple of Firefox extensions that do allow you to download your photos, something that Flickr itself should let you do, especially when you pay them religiously every year.
The Flickr backup is done in three steps: first you create a set in which you put all your photos and call it "Migrated to Googleplus", then you discover links to the original flickr photos, and finally you download the files from those links.
- Go to Flickr put all images in a new set
- Open Firefox and add the following two extensions
- Extension of DownThemAll!
- Extension Greasemonkey
- In Greasemmonkey you have to run the following script Flickr Link Original Images AllModThis is the most complicated step of the whole process.
- You tell the script to work on your Flickr set url Manage user script
- You load your set while logged in to flickr and the photos are displayed as thumbnails to fit more on the page, you will see how the script works and ORIG tags appear above the photos. And it takes a while to load the whole page because it generates links to all the originals of the photos (this takes about five minutes after loading the images in my case). After loading, wait a while for the ORIG tags to appear, as you can see in the following screenshot.
- Right-click and DownloadThemAll
- Link, filter that have "Orig"
- Rename with *flattext**Name*.*ext*.
- Download
- Patience and follow if there are more pages, in my case five and you have to go one by one. In my case, they are 12Mpx photos and each page takes about two hours to download at an effective speed of 1Mbps.
- Then you have to remove the small images that are duplicated, I have filtered them by size and deleted those smaller than 250Kb. You can also filter by the date of creation of the file, the thumbnails appear created at the time you visited the site.
With that, Flickr would be downloaded. Then, to do it right, I take the opportunity to rename the files and name them month and year, or season and year of creation. In my case I use Automator (Mac) and I name them according to their creation date to save them.
To upload to Google+ you can upload batches of 500 images but for me, one type of file of my latest photos kept crashing my computer so I ended up uploading the photos in smaller and smaller batches. I know it was a photo - a particular file type - that was giving me the problem but I couldn't identify it.
Seriously, it's worth it.
