organising the wood pile, how I backed up all my photos to Flickr

 

I suppose that like most Apple Mac users with a camera, I have taken photos, and just relied on iPhoto to keep them organised. I don’t take enough photos to have every worried too much about developing an efficient workflow or means of backing up. However my current laptop, despite having a 250gb hard drive is now very full, so it is time to start doing something a bit more systematic. I cannot claim that this is the most wonderful approach, that I have considered, or that I even understand the alternative options, but for what it is worth this is what I have done. 

The basic facts are that I have an iPhoto library of over three thousand photos, stretching back to scans of photos that I took in the pre-digital age. The early digital photos were from a very cheap Vivicam camera that got me started, the later ones from a Canon Ixus. None are terribly high end, but they are what I have. Although I do have Aperture, I find iPhoto does more of what I need so just use that.

I am a long time user of Flickr the photo site, and paid for a subscription shortly before you got unlimited access for free. 

I do back up my laptop, to an external hard drive, and although I have iCloud, Evernote and Dropbox, none seem terribly practical for easily backing up my photos. 

 

What I have decided upon is 

1. create a series of Smart Albums in iPhoto, see the File Menu, one for undated photos, then ones for each year that the photos were taken. Not essential but it helps to break down the mass of undifferentiated photos.
2. create a matching set of Albums on Flickr, although this can be done directly in Flickr I found it easier to do so using Flickr Uploader when I was uploading the photos. 
3. As hinted above, use the Flickr Uploader software to upload all the photos from each year. Flickr Uploader will let you select a Smart Folder on iPhoto to upload. You can set access rights at this point. The bulk of my photos are simply uploaded as only for my access. With hindsight it is best to keep the Smart Albums small, anything over a few hundred and it will be unwieldy. There were times when I left the computer running overnight to upload the photos. 
4. This then created a back up of my entire iPhoto library on Flickr. It is possible to check that the numbers match, that Flickr and iPhoto agree on how many photos there are. They treat videos slightly differently, iPhoto counts them separately. I never got numbers to entirely match up for the very large Albums, but it seemed to go more or less okay.
5. Having created this back up, I then went through my iPhoto library. Unfortunately it is not possible to do this within the Smart Albums, you need to work within the Folder of all photos. However the folder is sorted into date order, so it is easy enough to see what the last photo for a particular year should be. Knowing that it was all backed up, I worked through my photos in chronological order, publishing the best of them to Flickr public albums named, people, places and stuff. Family photos are saved to an invitation only Flickr album. I have invited my family to view that album. 
6. the final step will be to go through the Flickr albums and delete any duplicates. With hindsight it might have been easier to delete everything already on Flickr and just start over, but it would have lost any comments and view stats on the Flickr site. 

A few important points to note, if you want to upload your photos for back up purposes, then it is easiest to use Flickr Uploader. If you upload a photo using iPhoto, when you try and delete it from Flickr, it also want to delete it from Flickr, which rather defeats the point of backing the stuff up to get it off your hard drive.

The whole process is very time-consuming, it might be worth sprucing up your iPhoto library first to get rid of pointless duplicates and the complete rubbish. To be honest it is taking me days to back up and publish my photos, so this is a gold plated option that might not be for everyone.

This should cost nothing, Flickr now offers near unlimited storage for free. Flickr provides a lot added value for storing photos, you can save as public, completely private or restricted to those you have invited to view. Those viewing can comment etc, so there plenty of useful functionality. That said, it is online, I would not have anything hugely private online, just in case. If Flickr do amend their charging model or go bust, then you will lose your photos, so best to retain the really good ones on your hard drive in iPhoto and have a back up strategy in place for that. 

Going forward, this approach seems reasonably sustainable, setting up smart folders for each year or month, on iPhoto and then backing them up when they get to a certain size using Flickr Uploader. I will get better at deleting the surplus variations of photos, if there are six similar photos, just keep the best. Nowadays it is easy to generate a vast volume of digital content, so it is worth developing an approach to deal with it, that is not just wholly reliant on the one hard drive. This is still a work in progress, but it has meant that I am a lot more confident that my photos are safe and my family are able to enjoy them too.