Flickr to Picasa Migration

My Flickr Pro account is due for a renewal, I paid for it in the first place because I had more photos to put online than their free package would allow.  A couple of weeks ago there was a Google announcement about their storage prices dropping ($5 a year for 20 GB to be shared between Picasa and Gmail).

This was an easy one to calculate.  Picasa works so fantastically on my Android phone, and I’m a big Google fan in the first place, but the real winner is the desktop Picasa client.  If you haven’t played with it, go get it here.  The facial recognition thing is just awesome on its own, but aside from this the basic photo editing features and organizational tools it provides are just plain excellent.

Deciding to switch was the easy part, but migrating all my Flickr images and sets to Picasa would be the hard part.  I have all these images indexed in my desktop Picasa client already, but I really liked the way I organized and tagged everything in Flickr.  I hoped there would be a way to do a bulk migration, and one quick Google search led me to a free tool called Migratr.

After a quick download and install, it steps you through the migration process easily.  First step is to feed it the source info, in my case Flickr.  It started the download after this and a short while later all 890 photos were downloaded.  Best news of all, I guess I overestimated the storage I’d need and bought that Flickr Pro account for nothing.  These files only take up around 450 MB.

So, on to step 4, Exporting up to Picasa.  This should take considerably longer since upload speeds are slower than downloading, but this is just a one time thing and I need to head out to buy some groceries anyways.

True to its promise, the upload is following the same set (folder) scheme I had at Flickr.

After a couple of minutes I hit up my Picasa page and sure enough, the new photos already show up.  Very nice, thanks Migratr!