PicasaWeb export and Flickr Pro frustration

Having decided to make the move away from Picasaweb – [post] ‘new family photo workflow‘ , one of the problems we needed to overcome was to get all of our historic albums (around 175 albums, appx. 40GB) from PicasaWeb up to to new location.

Picasa (the desktop app) has a great operation as part of their Data Liberation Front :”Import from Google+ Photos” , which allows you to easily make a local copy of everything in your picasaweb/google+ photos account. However, be WARNED, it does not download files already on your machine, which in some cases could be the most efficient approach, but which unfortunately does not suit our circumstances.

Some time late 2008 we had to rebuild our PC, and lost our Picasa album data – at that time we were not yet using any metadata with our selected family photos. So the only knowledge we had about which photos we had selected – was their existence in a PicasaWeb album.

Today’s workaround was to find an existing Windows7 Virtual Machine, expand the HDD allocation, and to then install Picasa on the VM (with zero existing photos on it) and to run the import from there. This has worked well, although it appears we were also not uploading at max resolution back then either – so more work will be needed to recreate the same albums using the original quality source assets.

Flickr Pro frustration

Part 2 of last our current annoyances involves Flickr.

I upgraded to Flickr Pro yesterday and have been rather disappointed to find there appear to be two rather glaring gaps in the platform’s functionality. Hopefully I am overlooking something, but I currently cannot see how to do the following:

1) Export/download original files, with their original filenames.

2) Batch/bulk export all images from a set.

3) Batch/bulk export all sets from my account.

-I’ve opened a ticket with Flickr support-

— Flickr Support : have confirmed that their platform does not support the extraction of assets with their original filenames, and they do not provide any bulk or batch  extraction functionality. They also kindly highlighted that despite my contacting them within 15 mins of upgrading they do not give refunds.