This site contains 9,907 images that I had hosted at Flickr since 2003. Quite a large number and I admit I'm feeling mildly burned that I never hit the 10,000 image mark there. The reason that didn't happen is simple: Flickr costs too much and offers too little these days. Yahoo managed to kill off most of the social aspects of Flickr about a decade back and sold the smoking ruins to SmugMug. I'll give SmugMug credit for not being entirely awful, but they sure haven't made any improvements worth mentioning, either. They've mostly been milking the userbase. And this year they grabbed an extra teat: The price jumped from $80-ish a year to $140-ish a year (in CAD). Yeah, no.

I had already built my own blogging software by this point and I have my own Web server, so the only thing holding me back was having my content locked into their platform. Except it isn't. Full props to Flickr for providing a good export facilty with full data in .json sidecar files that accompany the images. Every image imported into this blog kept its title, captions, likes, and comments. Every album kept its view count. The comments were critical to me as many were left by my best friend who passed from cancer in 2024. I would have left my images there forever rather than lose those comments.

The utility pictured above is called FLKR FCKR (that name!) and it just works. It's a python app that is solid on both Windows 10/11 and any recent-ish Linux distro. It's one of the desktop companion apps for SNAPSMACK, currently the best photo blogging utility* and its free just like SNAPSMACK is. The download link is inside the SNAPSMACK software itself with all of the other desktop utilities. SNAPSMACK also has a built in support forum in case you run into trouble and need help correcting a wonky import (hey, it happens).

You can see what my Flickr Pro account looked like, above left. Above right is what it looks like when the images and data were first imported into SNAPSMACK. Deliberately close by design using the SLICKR skin. There are differences, but they are functional differences that I wanted to have., so, no complaints here. Anyhow, if you, like me, are less than happy with Flickr these days, there's a free path out. Or there will be soon when SNAPSMACK goes to public beta late this summer.

Cheers.

Sean M.

*It turns out SNAPSMACK is now the only dedicated and free, self-hosted, photo blogging software available, period. There aren't even any real paid products that do the same things. This automatically makes us the best AND the worst. Sigh.