Flickr is a great way to share photos with family, friends, and the rest of the world. However, there are a few simple features that Flickr lacks the ability to do. The most annoying one is the ability to download an entire set of photos. Very often I upload a set of photos and want to share them with my friends (at original resolution) and the only way Flickr allows them to download the set is one image at a time. Any set containing more than a few photos will therefore never be downloaded. However, there are a few simple tools you can use to automate the process and allow you to share your high quality images with your family and friends.
One way to deal with the problem, is to subscribe to an RSS feed of the photos in iPhoto and automatically download the photos. Unfortunately, Flickr RSS feeds only contain 20 images so if a user uploads a set of photos only 20 of them will be visible in the user’s photo feed. Services like Flickr2Photocast can extend upon this limit, but still don’t let you download a particular set (At least I couldn’t get it to work). On top of that, iPhoto is obviously OS X only and from personal experience, crashes when you try to subscribe to a photocast containing large sets of images with large file sizes. Additionally, a user may not want to subscribe to a set of photos but rather just download some of your photos once and only once.
The best way to download a set of images that I post to Flickr is by using a tool called FlickrDown. FlickrDown is a simple Windows tool that allows you to download original images from individual sets of photos. The photos are then saved to a folder of your choice on your hard drive. To get started using FlickrDown, download the self installer file here and start the installation. Once complete, open the program. To find the sets of photos available for download, you need to give the program a little bit of information. As shown below, type in “blakebrannon” “Blake Brannon” without quotes into the search field and select username, lookup. All available sets are shown and you can check which set you would like to download.
Once you have selected the set or sets of photos you would like, scroll to the bottom of the window and select the destination folder. Next click “Download” and let the progress begin. Depending on your Internet connection and set size, this process could take a while. Fortunately, you have lots of stuff to do so you can just leave it and come back later.
As mentioned above, this is a Windows tool so to run using Linux requires WINE and OS X Parallels. After a quick Goggle and reading a few forums, I found a Java OS X tool that does the same thing with one BIG flaw. The program, called Flickrbackup only allows you to download images if you have user privileges, i.e. you can only download my images if you are logged into my account. The tool does work great but defeats the point in allowing friends to download sets from other users. Below are some screen shots of the program in action.
A nice tool, thanks for the blog and thanks google for finding it