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Flickr iOS 7 auto-upload app with 1TB of storage blows Photo Stream out of the water

Photo: engadget.com

Photo: engadget.com

Today’s update to the iOS Flickr app offers auto-uploading of full-res photos to your private Flickr gallery. Couple this to the 1TB of free storage available and you effectively have a Photo Stream style service that can store over half a million photos, rather than simply the last 1,000.

Flickr introduced the 1TB capacity back in May (with parent company Yahoo offering the same free storage to email users yesterday). If you sync iPhoto with Flickr, you effectively get all the benefits of Photo Stream but with 500 times the capacity. You do need to be careful with this, however: the sync is two-way, so if you delete photos from Flickr, they will also be deleted from iPhoto … 

The updated app also offers auto-straightening of photos via the Flickr editor, and resolves problems some people have experienced signing-in with Google accounts. The last major update to the Flickr app back in August introduced live filters and editing functions.

The Flickr app can be downloaded from iTunes. The app is compatible with iOS 6 also, but you’ll need to be running iOS 7 to get auto-uploads.

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Comments

  1. Ednar Belmonte - 10 years ago

    How can I sync my flickr photostream to iphoto on my mac?

  2. icrew - 10 years ago

    That’d be great if Flickr didn’t mess with your photos by recompressing them. To see this in action, upload a large jpeg file, re-download it, and compare it to the original. The resolution will be the same, but the file size will be quite a bit less, having been recompressed with a significantly higher level of jpeg compression. NOT cool….

    • Blazer0x (@Blazer0x) - 10 years ago

      Are you sure this isn’t because you are using the option to strip the EXIF data from your photos?

      • icrew - 10 years ago

        Yeah, I’m sure–the size difference is dramatic: Think fractions, not just a little bit. Try it for yourself.

  3. Yes! I want to put all my pictures off my camera phone onto the Internet. What could possibly go wrong with have 1TB of my most private photos available on the web.

    Dont get me wrong. I love the added storage capability, but I’m not sure if I want to keep all of my iphone pics on Flickr. Atleast with Photostream I feel like they are more securely stored and accessed.

    • Blazer0x (@Blazer0x) - 10 years ago

      By default “only you” can see the auto-uploaded photos, so your “accidental” pics of your genitals are safe :P

      • Mr Ion Tichy (@MrTichy) - 10 years ago

        Not true about default being set to private. By default “share with everyone” is enabled on iPhone Photo-stream. Before uploading anything, go to settings and tighten privacy settings. I signed up for Flickr and started an upload from my iPhone without bothering checking on privacy settings. Before I knew it, I had blasted most of my iPhone photo cache to an open internet. I realized something is wrong when people started commenting on my photos and my phonce started to get crazy notifications from Flickr… So in the middle of upload I went into security settings and switched everything to “me only”. That worked on photos already uploaded. However, photos that were currently in que, were still being uploaded as open to “Everyone”.

  4. Its full of bugs, how can Yahoo keep doing it worse and worse?

  5. I had a Yahoo email for years and years….like most, I started using GMail more. I didn’t log into Yahoo for a few months, and then found out they deleted my ENTIRE profile because it was longer than 3 months. Now I get that they can’t host everything, forever, but 3 months away to delete everything is too far.

    No way I’ll be hosting my photos with a company that takes it upon themselves to delete my data. No thanks.

  6. H.Murchison (@hmurchison) - 10 years ago

    Photostream is really just a tool to keep your photos safe until you manage them later. It has some nice sharing features but the overall aim is to protect the photos you have. Flickr upload is nice but i’m really not into cloud hosted solutions. I can pickup a 4TB drive for $150 at Costco. I’m really more into local management and backup.

    • Steve Lawrence - 10 years ago

      You should be using both. What happens if that 4TB drive fails (which it will one day) or the house it’s in burns down or is robbed? You need to be backing up locally and via cloud if you want to protect your photos.

  7. PMZanetti - 10 years ago

    Not very impressive. Rarely have I ever wished that I could see more than my last thousand photos in Photostream, and I have the peace of mind of knowing that iPhoto is downloading and KEEPING everything permanently.

    • Ben Lovejoy - 10 years ago

      iPhoto will still do that if you use Flickr rather than (or as well as) Photo Stream. Can’t see any reason not to have all photos rather than just the last 1000, though …

  8. Leigh Smiff - 10 years ago

    I just looked at the ‘default’ settings on my iPhone, and the default setting was Public… I can’t access Flickr through my work computer and had to resort to powering down the phone to stop some, er, lots, er OK, mostly ‘private’ photos from uploading. I won’t know how many got through til i get home. But by then, the girlfriend may know.

  9. Juan Carlos Munoz - 10 years ago

    The new update version of Flickr claims that the sign-in with Google/Gmail account has been fix and that will never happen again. But it is NOT true still only accepts Yahoo accounts and when you try to sign-in with your Google/Gmail account it said that Flickr is temporarily unavailable and to try again later but it never let you sign-in, so it is NOT fix !!!

  10. haquers - 10 years ago

    One of my favorite things about Photostream is having the last 1000 photos from all of my iDevices synced. Does Flickr allow multiple device sign-in?

  11. roman8war - 10 years ago

    Yup, no way to sign in with G+, so had to use one of my FB junk accounts. Failed to upload my first photo by crashing on the iOS 7. Back to using Picasa. :-)

  12. Apple Friend or Foe? - 9 years ago

    Any cool cataloging features?

  13. Michele (@AristyCat) - 9 years ago

    Any cool cataloging features?

Author

Avatar for Ben Lovejoy Ben Lovejoy

Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer and EU Editor for 9to5Mac. He’s known for his op-eds and diary pieces, exploring his experience of Apple products over time, for a more rounded review. He also writes fiction, with two technothriller novels, a couple of SF shorts and a rom-com!


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