Make Flickr your external hard drive substitute

Any time you want to lose all of your data and the massive amounts of photos you have saved on your computer, just *think* about backing your data up and in that glorious moment that you’re thinking about it, the chances are that your computer will make a really loud sound (or worse, go silent) and stop working to the point where Fry’s says, “our computer recognizes the hard drive but there’s nothing on it.” “Uh, what? No!”

Yeah, I did this last year and although my laptop decided to magically work again (yes, within hours of plopping down the big bucks for a new laptop, it was perfectly fine as if nothing had happened), I thought I’d lost everything.

Frankie Say Relax

What I most worried about were my photos– family, social and (oh crap) business images were potentially gone. Had I put two and two together, I would have backed my images up on Flickr. But retrieving images in mass from Flickr has long been impossible, but Adobe offers a new service for free called flump that allows you to download an entire photostream (yours or someone else’s) to your desktop.

Sweet Uses for Flump

• Back up your own images.
• Search Flickr for Creative Commons images that are legal to use, download an entire photostream applicable to your city for blog images.
• Find a photostream with amazing professional stock-like images for general business use.

I tested the service out and it works really well! What uses can *you* think of??

Article originally published on August 15, 2008.