How to Back Up Your Online Photos

As we've all learned by now, the only constant on the Web is change. Your favorite photo-sharing site can get shut down; your online media repository can suddenly go poof; that Web site you built 13 years ago might not still be around. Social networks that seem fail-proof now will someday get acquired or go bust, or they'll change their terms of service and drive you away.

These are just some of the risks of storing your personal stuff "in the cloud." If you're a heavy user of a photo-sharing service like Flickr or keep everything on Facebook, having a local backup of your online photo collection is crucial. You probably already have most of those photos on your PC, and if you don't, there are lots of free tools online that can grab them for you. But what should interest you is storing not just the photos, but all the work you put into them: the titles, descriptions, tags, and so on.

"JPEG pictures support storing such information [tags, description, title, and geocoding] in XMP, IPTC, and EXIF metadata formats in the files themselves," says Erwyn van der Meer, developer of Flickr Metadata Synchr, in an e-mail to me. "This information is used by tools such as Windows Live Photo Gallery, Google Picasa, Adobe Photoshop, and many others."

Having a backup of your pictures and metadata means that if your favorite service goes bust or accidently deletes your data, or your account gets hacked, your photos will still be safe on your local drive, ready for re-uploading. There are a few ways to get your Flickr stuff onto your home computer. Pulling from Facebook is a bit more cumbersome, but still possible.

Tips for Windows Users
For Windows users, there are two good options for backing up Flickr photos and metadata. The free Flickr Metadata Synchr matches up the metadata on your local images with that of your Flickr images, and includes some robust features and controls. For instance, it can download any Flickr photos that aren't already on your hard drive, and it can match up images based on EXIF data, the date the image was taken, the image title, or the filename.

Another free tool, Migratr, can move your photo collection around between all the big photo-sharing services, and pull it off the cloud and onto your hard drive, too. It currently works with Flickr, Picasa, Phanfare, Photobucket, SmugMug, Zoomr, and more.

I used it to move my Flickr collection to both Phanfare and my hard drive, and both transfers were easy. I didn't see the metadata on my local copies at first, only the pictures' EXIF data. Developer Alexander Lucas pointed me to the XML file that contains it all, which was stored in the same folder as my images. When I uploaded the files to Phanfare, the metadata was all there and correctly associated with my images.

The one caution Lucas offered is that you can't rename local copies of your photos—doing so would would break the association with the metadata in the XML file. In other words, use the Migratr tool to back up your photos, and then leave that backup folder alone unless you need to re-upload your collection.

If you want to grab your Facebook images, try Album Exporter. The Facebook app lets you select which albums to download, or you can download every image of yourself (even from other users' photo collections). Because you can poach other people's pictures, as long as someone—even a third party—has tagged you in them, the converse is also true: Anyone else can download your pictures. But you already knew that content you've uploaded to Facebook isn't particularly "private," right? Once you've selected the albums you want to download, Album Exporter will e-mail you a link where you can get them, or you can download a ZIP file of the images from the app itself by clicking on My Recent Downloads.

Tips for Mac Users
Facebook and Flickr syncing is built in to iPhoto '09, and the sync feature includes a fairly simple way to move photos and metadata onto your hard drive. To get started, upload a photo from iPhoto to Flickr to create a new synced set in your Flickr account—name it something obvious like "backed-up images" so you'll easily identify it. From then on, iPhoto will update that synced set on both iPhoto and Flickr with new additions to either one. So grab all the Flickr photos you want to back up, copy them to this set on Flickr, and hit Sync in iPhoto—and be sure to choose a good location for the backed-up photos.

The syncing process will take a while (I'd let it run overnight if you have more than a few hundred Flickr photos), but when it's done, you'll have a local copy of every photo with the metadata still attached. Keep these backed-up photos safe by moving them to a new location on your hard drive, or at least by unsyncing the iPhoto folder from Flickr.

This same process works with iPhoto-Facebook syncing, but it's more cumbersome, as there isn't an easy way to move a large batch of images between Facebook photo sets. Still, backing them up is possible: Just go through each category and hit Edit Photos, and then assign each picture to your synced set.

Once the images are synced with iPhoto, I'd recommend moving the local versions to a new, unsynced folder so you can return your Facebook photos to their original albums. (I warned you it would be more cumbersome!)

Back up, be safe, and enjoy!