Preface: Changes to Flickr and Google Photos

On November 1, Flickr changed its free tier: it no longer offers 1 TB of free storage since January 8, 2019, and users can only upload at most 1000 photos and videos for free. Another new change brings a more tight limitation: starting from February 5, 2019, Flickr will start to delete photos that are beyond the 1000-photo limit (It will delete the oldest one first). That is to say, free users will lose their photos when their accounts store more than 1000 photos.

However, it is safe to say that nobody wants to lose his or her photos and videos under Flikr accounts at all. So, users try hard to find ways to move photos from Flickr to Google Photos and other new cloud storage services. Under such a circumstance, it quickly comes to most people’s minds that Google Photos is a wonderful substitute among several clouds.

According to Google’s announcement in July 2019, the connection between Google Drive and Google Photos has been removed. That is to say, when you add new photos to Google Photos, these photos will not show in the Google Photos folder of your Google Drive. And the same goes to add new photos to Google Drive, either. This change makes Google Photos more like an independent cloud drive service for storing photos just like Flickr.

Flickr to Google Photos Migration
Flickr to Google Photos Migration

Why Migrate Flickr to Google Photos?

Both Flickr and Google Photos are known for providing good cloud storage services. But in terms of comparison, Google Photos dominates Flickr. That's why people import Flickr photos to Google Photos. Flickr has a maximum storage of 1,000 photos for free. This means that when this limit is exceeded, Flickr will start deleting old photos. As a result, you may likely have lost your old photos without prior knowledge. But even under this circumstance, some of you may still try to transfer Google Photos to Flickr due to Flickr's great gallery.

Google Photos is considered to be one of the best cloud storage platforms for storing photos. This is due to some of the advantages it provides.

  • As is known to all, Flickr’s uploading speed is very slow and it supports basic uploading way only. However, uploading photos to Google Photos is much faster and has more options, such as, automatically uploading photos from external media and auto-grouping photos by facial recognition. And, Google Photos is more flexible in ways of downloading photos.
  • Google Photos is better for exploring photos. It can smartly search specific photos by typing into them, such as object name, site, and so on.
  • Google Photos offers 15 GB of free cloud storage shared with Google Drive and supports more photo formats than Flickr, such as .rm2, .bmp, .webp, and RAW images.

How to Migrate Flickr to Google Photos in Two Ways

Since you select Google Photos as a substitute, it’s a question of how to migrate photos from Flickr to Google Photos with ease.

Solution 1: Flickr to Google Photos Migration by Downloading and Uploading

Considering that there is no way to download photos from Flickr automatically, you may have to transfer Flickr to Google Photos manually with a few extra steps through the traditional way, which needs you to download and upload.

Step 1: Go to the official website of Flickr and log in.

Step 2: Click the colorful icon in the top right corner and select “Settings” in the dropdown menu.

Step 3: Move to the “Personal Information” interface and click on the “Request my Flickr data” button in the “Your Flickr Data” selection.

Download Photos from Flickr
Download Photos from Flickr

Step 4: Choose the zip file of "Photos and videos" to download to your local storage.

Download Zip File from Flickr
Download Zip File from Flickr

Step 5: Log in to your Google Photos account.

Step 6: Click on the “Upload” button to upload photos and videos to Google Photos.

This method can help you to download photos at once without selecting all the photos in the "Camera Roll" of Flickr, but there are still three important notes that you may not ignore.

Notes:

  • When you select several files to download at once, these photos will be compressed into a zip file. You may need to unzip the file into a folder of photos before uploading photos to Google Photos one by one.
  • The volume and resolution of the photos which you want to download determine how large the zip file will be.
  • The volume of the zip file and your network affect the speed of downloading and uploading tasks.
  • If you don't want to move all the photos from Flickr to Google Photos, just enter the "Camera Roll" of your Flickr account and select the photos to download.

Solution 2. Migrate Flickr to Google Photos by Cloud Transfer of MultCloud

You may already find how complicated the migration between Flickr and Google Photos is since you must take some steps and download manually under the instruction of solution1. You could turn to some third-party tools for help. Here, Multcloud can help you a lot in migrating from Flickr to Google Photos.

MultCloud is a web-based multiple cloud storage manager which can help migrate photos from Flickr to Google Photos without downloading and uploading. It offers the Cloud Transfer, Cloud Sync, Cloud Backup, and Team Transfer functions to help you transfer data across clouds. Based on the OAuth authorization system and 256-bit AES Encryption, MultCloud is such a secure service for your data. Now let’s have a closer look at how to move photos from Flickr to google photos via MultCloud.

Step 1: Sign up MultCloud for free.

Sign up MultCloud
Sign up MultCloud

Step 2: Click "Add Cloud" to add Flickr and Google Photos to MultCloud.

Add Flickr and Google Photos
Add Flickr and Google Photos to MultCloud

Note: You can add only one cloud at a time. If you want to add more clouds to MultCloud, just repeat step 2.

Step 3: Move pictures from Flickr to Google Photos with "Cloud Transfer". Click on the “Cloud Transfer” button and select Flickr as the source and Google Photos as the destination.

Step 4: Click “Transfer Now”  to let the transfer task run by itself.

Migrate Flikr to Google Photos
Transfer Flikr to Google Photos

Notes:

  • If there are lots of photos that need to transfer from Flickr to Google Photos, you could close the browser window or even shut down your PC as long as the task starts because MultCloud can run your task by its background program but neither your device nor your network.
  • If there are some pictures with certain file extensions which you do not want to transfer, you can exclude them by enabling "Filter" under "Options" after subscribing MultCloud to a higher level.
  • If you want to set the Flickr to Google Photos photo migration into the automatic and periodical mode, you could set daily, weekly, or monthly scheduled cloud file transfer before starting the transfer task.
  • Even though MultCloud sets no limit on transfer speed so that you could migrate from Flickr to Google Photos quickly, you are still able to increase the transfer speed given that transferring photos may take longer time than transferring other files. All you need to do is upgrade your subscription plan, then MultCloud will offer you another 8 threads instead of only 2 to transfer data from cloud to cloud faster.

Final Words

As you can see, it’s quite easy to migrate Flickr to Google Photos through the above two methods. If MultCloud is your first choice, you could also transfer Google Photos to Flickr through the second solution illustrated above.

What's more, MultCloud supports dozens of leading cloud drive services including Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Mega, Box, Yandex, Google Photos, etc. Therefore, you can transfer, sync, or back up data from one of your clouds to another. You could also sync Flickr to OneDrive via MultCloud with the Cloud Sync function.

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