Ah, Flickr. How we love you. We loved the idyllic pre-Yahoo! days, and held back our tears with the Yahoo! phase of growth. But even when things seem so good, we wonder what the future holds. Microsoft? AOL? An undead uprising?Now couple our fears with our stupidity. All those photos we uploaded over the past year or two? The ones housed safely on our hard drive? Yeah, right... the hard drive we, in our infinite wisdom, managed to reformat during a routine upgrade?
Flickr, you are our only hope. You hold our memories safe and secure on a server bank. Somewhere. And it's not that we don't trust you. It's Microsoft, AOL, and zombies we have problems with. Sure, some of us could do a mass download from your servers on to our machines. But for others, there's that Microsoft thing again.
We use Linux, and but for one word, we'd be horribly out of luck.
Yes, one word saves us, one word that doesn't really spell anything: Flickrfs. We've covered Flickrfs before, in the far distant era called 2005. Times were tough in 2005, and people feared mightily this thing called the "command line." This little app was stored away in the Closet of Things that Scare Us until Wired pointed us in its direction today.
Now we are fearlessly downloading our photos from Flickr, sans the command line. If we just were aiming for speed, we could use Flickrfs exclusively, but we like pretty too. Yes, now there's a GUI for the whole process. From the Flickrfs mastermind comes DesktopFlickrOrganizer. We can use it to upload, download and organize photos right on Flickr itself.
Flickrfs has some nifty instructions for non-Ubuntu installation. If you are using Ubuntu, you're in some real luck, as it appears that both Flickrfs and DesktopFlickrOrganizer (DFO) are in the usual Ubuntu and Debian repositories. Sweet, and requires very little mental effort! We like it!
And we all know zombies prefer brains that think a lot. Flickrfs and DFO. Keeping your brain and your pictures safe, come what may.
[via Wired]
