Migrate Your Instagram Photos to Flickr in One Click. | Hacker News Reader

Migrate Your Instagram Photos to Flickr in One Click.

freethephotos.com

219 pointsthekevinjones59 comments

"Think of the kittens, think of the breakfast plates, think of the converse shoes. Free the photos."

Best quote ever and pretty much encompasses everything about Instagram in one sentence. I don't see what the big deal is, Instagram issued a clarification statement about the TOS changes. And in all honesty it's not like the photo quality of an iPhone image is that great, especially not for advertisement purposes let alone the subject quality of the images themselves.

As an aside: you can't argue Flickr's $25 per year pro account is extremely good value for money. Especially if you're uploading a lot of photos. I've seen photo shoots that resulted in thousands of images before from just the one shoot. Instagram isn't a site for pro photographers, it's more teenagers at parties and hipster eateries.

Haha, definitely agree. It was mostly a fun exercise for us to build for the community so people can send a copy of their Instagram photos over to Flickr. We love data portability and we also understand both Instagram and Flickr are businesses and they want to make money. This gives users the freedom to move, don't move, use both, etc.

Definitely a great idea. I'm sure there are some out there not a part of the majority who take Instagram seriously and would love to move their photos to Flickr.

just downloaded all my photos! That was fast! Great job on the app! :)

Instagram issued a clarification statement about the TOS changes

I only saw a statement of their intent to issue a clarification in the future- a statement that seemed to be a lie.

I don't use these services, but I am pleased that the professional and serious amateur photographers I know are either leaving or preparing to leave the service. It sends an important message: we're not going to tolerate douchy behavior.

This was posted shortly after. http://blog.instagram.com/post/38252135408/thank-you-and-wer... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4939849

I don't intend to sound snarky...but professional and serious amateur photographers use Instagram?! For what?

Is there more to the service than meets the eye? (Never used it myself)

Yes, I know a few. I think they use it to maintain interest on their social sites. For instance, a pro will post pictures he intends to sell and whatnot on facebook, but between shootings will post other, off-the-cuff shots just to keep the viewers/fanbase engaged. Using a service like this allows him to clearly delineate what we should view as pro work and what we should view as goofing around.

I really hope this Instragram black-eye (even if they fix it) triggers a rebirth of interest in Flickr. Flickr was a great site once and remains a great idea.

Definitely. One of Flickr's biggest problems was it's lack of mobile support, and now, their iOS app is awesome, so I can only imagine good things from them.

Yeah, it's good to see a new iOS app from them. Looks like they're starting to get the attention they deserve within Yahoo. I just hope that it remains a photo site with a social element, rather than the reverse.

  Think of the kittens, think of the breakfast plates, think of the converse shoes. 
  Free the photos.

Best quote ever.

Nicely done! Flickr's API is a big reason why despite lacking growth in other departments, I'm still a happy paying customer of theirs. When I heard about the Instagram hubbub, I figured something like this would appear within a day or two, given how easy their API is to work with. That's not to downplay the work done here - great, simple, effective implementation

The Flickr API has some fun quirks, but it was a good experience overall. I'm glad you liked the app :)

I had a go with it fairly recently and I was generally really impressed. Some odd naming conventions but you can't half get some great data out of it.

And hello to good old friend, Flickr! Instagram's loss is flickr's gain. Time for some Real photography, beyond filters!

I don't like that Flickr is so focused on the iPhone. It's a free app, and yet it chooses to make a big SEND TO IPHONE button on the screen, and completely hides that it even supports Android, even though there are more Android phones in the world at this point. I just don't understand what's the reasoning behind focusing so much on the iPhone. Are they trying to pretend they are focusing on a niche or what?

http://www.flickr.com

I think that's just coz they have a new revamped iPhone app.

I find it odd myself, but it might be because Android cameras are not as popular as any iPhone on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Android may be the more popular platform in general, but there sure are an awful lot of iPhones being used to take pictures for Flickr, and apparently not a whole lot of Android phones.

The most popular camera on Flickr: the iPhone 4S. Not just the most popular cameraphone—the most popular camera. The second most popular at the moment? The iPhone 4.

Cameras brands, in order of popularity on Flickr: Canon, Nikon, Apple, …, Samsung, HTC, …, Nokia, Kodak, Motorola …

Cameraphone popularity, in order: iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 5, iPhone 3GS, Samsung Galaxy S II.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/cameras/

Perhaps they're causing some bias in these numbers today by not pushing the Android app, and some more bias by not reporting Android phones as a group, but given the data they have, I'm not surprised they push the iOS app over the Android version. It looks like their user base is very heavily biased towards the iPhone.

To add, perhaps iPhone users are more engaged with Flicker to the point where iPhone interactions outnumber Flicker interactions.

Taking this a step further, perhaps Flicker is trying to align more with the iPhone/Apple brand than the Google (Picassa/+) brand.

thats because the camera quality on most android phones is awful. Iphone is clear, crisp, sharp and most importantly QUICK!

I love my galaxy note to pieces but I still take photos on my iphone!

If you wanted to make money as a mobile app developer, would you put your effort into Android?

Its a free app.

TANSTAAFL

Android has shipped more phones but they're far less used, mostly due to the same reason it's so much more expensive to develop for: for every iPhone-competitive Android phone in use there is at least one phone with marginal hardware, an antique unsupported OS release, horrible vendor/carrier modded UI. All those “free smartphone” offers count towards units shipped even if the only app regularly used is Facebook. If you're Flickr, you also have to deal with the crazy range in camera quality - akin to having to support everything from the iPhone 1 to 5.

Google's inability to get carriers & vendors to be serious platform maintainers is the best thing which happened to Apple.

This might be a good time for Flickr to consider changing their import policies for new users.

This is awesome, also don't forget to delete your account from Instagram afterwards and delete the app, here is how to for account and also alternate to download your photos: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/how-to-download-your-...

Am I the only one who will keep all photos on Instagram? I seriously don't understand what the fuzz is about. Not one single time have I've seen anything bad happen after privacy "scandals" like this and I'm pretty sure nothing will happen this time either.

Do you mean "anything bad happen" to you personally, and that things that only happen to "other people" don't count?

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/technology/1012/gallery....

I don't see the big deal with any of those incidents to be honest. Would you really care if someone saw your Netflix history? Anyway, what I meant was that alarmists think Instagram is going all evil which I seriously doubt will happen. When have those fears come true?

Maybe you didn't read them all, but I believe that someone finding you and killing you with a gun is a fairly big deal to most people.

If someone was proposing to somebody, I think they would prefer that they break the news to the girl rather than Facebook and/or their friends.

Under "Why are we doing this?" It just says

"This is a migration service built so you can keep the rights to your photos. If you haven't read Instagram's new terms of service, read more here.

Update: Instagram has updated their stance on the issue. Read the blog post here.

We don't store, keep or use your data, information, or photos in any way. All data is streamed directly from Instagram to Flickr. When it comes to your photos, we agree with Flickr."

I understand what the tool does but I still don't understand why you're offering this service. I'm guessing it's a fun hack and a service to the community but I'm curious to hear why you decided to build the tool.

It was mostly for the fun of building it and using a couple APIs that were new to us. We use APIs all day long at Cloudsnap so this was more of a fun exercise for the community to use if they want to send a copy of their Instagram photos over to Flickr.

I never understood what was so great about Flickr. I can only upload 300 MB a month of photos? And only view my last 200 photos? What's great about that?

Instagram is a huge hit and is the defacto standard for taking and uploading photos to social services. No monthly limits, no limits on viewing photos...

Flickr needs to free people's photos more than Instagram does.

(Great service though to the OP. I am actually trying it now too despite Flickr's limits!)

It really all depends on your preference. One of the great things about Flickr was always their ability to handle the full resolution and large photos, and the ability to keep the angles and crops you wanted, whereas Instagram resizes them to down and crops them all for you, losing the original photo.

With Flickr's lack of mobile support, they've always had somewhat separate target audiences. I'm guessing that in the future, these targets will become more aligned with the way both companies are moving.

These limits only apply if you don't value their service enough to pay for their product (which is especially true given that Flickr does not commonly show ads for random products, certainly not intrusive ones; at worst you see "sponsoring groups" in some contexts).

The limits only apply to the free plan. For $25/year all limits (and ads) are removed: http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28. And you're less likely to see dubious changes to the ToS when you are the paying customer.

The 300 MB/month limit is their free product. For $25/(Correction - not month, but year!) you get their pro package which includes: (from their upgrade option link):

  o Unlimited uploads (up to 50MB per photo)
  o Unlimited viewing of your entire photo library
  o Post photos in up to 60 groups
  o Download your original, high-resolution photos – whenever you need them
  o Upload and play unlimited HD videos
  o Browse Flickr completely ad-free
  o View stats on your account

I can't begin to explain how ridiculous the Flickr value proposition is for $25/year - and, indeed, there are some photographers with upwards of 100,000 pictures on the site.

[Edit - I was inspired to go try out Flickr just because of the hoofrah and this cool tool that let me move my instagram pictures - Wow - great Batch Editting, Set Collection, Image management. You can see the advantage of a tool with a decades worth of work into it. Signed up for a pro account]

correction: $25/year (first line)

We use flickr at our lab as a photo dump for an eyefi, and absolutely adore it in every single way. I seriously cannot say how valuable that is to us.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/hslphotosync/

It needs to be said that one of the original value propositions to flickr was their API and famous "you show me yours, i'll show you mine" policy -- basically letting users take all their photos and data, including porting them to any service that also allowed full export.

This includes full resolution, EXIF data, etc. (though it did/does not AFAIK include comments inside the community, which are subject to user TOS with other users, thus this makes sense in several ways)

Well, and I never understood what is so great about Instagram.

If it wasn't for it being mentioned all the time in HN, I would never had heard of it.

Wow - this is great. I was just looking for a quick tool to do exactly this. Worked perfectly - within 5 min. Thanks!

One question - does the Instagram API not facilitate location export? As in... none of my Instagram location info was moved over to Flickr location data.

Both of them do support location, but we weren't able to get this done within our timebox today. It's something we'll look to add in the near future, and moving tags over, as well. Sorry about that.

Hey - I understand! If you had to move something to the top of your to-do list, that would be it. I can't be the only one that is addicted to seeing my photos on a map. Either way - thanks!

We rolled this out last night! You now get the locations and proper "photo taken at" timestamps if the data exists in Instagram.

The transfer would take longer if Instagram hadn't already thrown out nearly all of the bits from the original photo.

This is awesome, nice work. Although I'd prefer one that transferred them to Picasa/Google+.

Thanks Treeder!

http://pi.pe/ might be able to handle those transfers. I haven't looked into it too much and I'm not sure what the experience is like, but I have seen it posted several times for that type of request. Might want to check it out.

http://instabyebye.com

1 click export from insta

it worked

Awesome. Glad it worked!

Wonderful UX with this, very simple and efficient, took less than a minute for me. The only thing that could make more sense is to upload the photos oldest first.

Thanks. Glad it worked out.

We're currently experiencing an uptick in users right now, so it's not uncommon for some users with 2,000+ photos to take about 15 minutes or so to sync.

Edited: Yeah, we're uploading the newest ones first. We may look into changing that tonight sometime when we get a chance. Sorry for not clarifying that anywhere.

Worked flawlessly - all my pictures over in less than a minute.

news shock.. business tries to make profit. freeloaders complain..

I see you, Marissa . . .

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