The estimated reading time for this post is 5 minutes
Having a camera on your phone means you can take plenty of pictures anytime, anywhere for free. Those special moments can be easily preserved for prosperity, but there are some downsides to cell phone pictures. First, the space on your phone can be consumed by your photos so you run out of space for other things, such as apps, music and other data. Second, your photos are vulnerable to the perils of being on a phone: becoming lost or damaged.
Flickr solves both of these issues, giving you an opportunity to move photos off of your phone and giving you an easy way to back up your photos, keeping them safe from calamities that may happen to your phone.
Phones can fill up fast which leaves people with the terrible choice of which pictures to keep. Transferring pictures to your computer can be a hassle and then you have the problem of your computer filling up with photos. Storing your pictures on Flickr frees up all kinds of space on your phone and your computer. When you do (eventually) replace your phone and your computer, you don’t have to worry about transferring your photos if they’re stored on Flickr.
The recent iOS 7 update had many people scurrying to make room on their iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch as iOS 7 resides in a voluminous 3 GB of space on your device. People who had filled their phones with photos were making tough choices about which pictures they wanted to get rid of: adorable baby photos, scenic travel photos or treasured pics of their pooch.
Flickr to the Rescue!
Flickr, an online photo sharing site, is giving its users a radically generous 1 TB of free space. That’s one terabyte, as in 1000 GB, of space. For free.
The good news is that no matter how much space you have on your phone, you cannot possibly have enough photos on your phone to use up your free space on Flickr. Can’t happen.
The free space on Flickr gives you room for about 2 million photos of average size, more than any phone can hold. Perhaps over time you can fill up your Flickr space but perhaps then you could open a second Flickr account?
Other photo storage sites exist on the web but you would be hard-pressed to find another one that gives you as much storage space for free.
How to Get Started
Go to flickr.com to sign up for Flickr. Yahoo owns Flickr so you need to get a Yahoo account if you don’t have one already. If you already have one, you can sign up for Flickr with your Yahoo ID and password.
Uploading Pictures to Flickr
You can upload pictures to Flickr from your computer or from an app on your mobile device.
You can also email photos to your Flickr account using a custom email address. Go to Settings => Emails and Notifications to discover your Flickr email address.
Flickr Apps
The free Flickr app is available for:
Flickr Auto Uploads
The Flickr iPhone app was updated this week to allow automatic photo uploads from your device. Open the app and tap on the double dot in the lower menu bar on the right and choose Auto Upload.
When you turn it on, you will be asked to give permission for the app to access your photos.
Activate Auto Uploads and the app will send any photos you take on your iPhone or iPod Touch to your Flickr account. You must have updated your device to iOS 7 to use Auto Uploads.
[note]Flickr’s Auto Uploads has not yet been enabled for iPad or Android devices. [/note]
You can choose to upload your images over Wi-Fi only or over Wi-Fi and cellular data. Make sure to Mind the Cap! and be mindful of your monthly data limits when you do Auto Uploads. You may want to use Wi-Fi to upload large quantities of photos.
Privacy
You can control who sees your Flickr photos.
Online, go to Settings => Privacy & Permissions and choose your privacy settings.
On your iOS app, go into Settings => Photo Privacy. You can choose from:
- Public
- Friends & Family
- Friends
- Family
- Private (Only You)
Sharing with Flickr
Flickr makes it easy to share your photos with others. You can get your own web address (URL). Go to Settings => Personal Information => Your Flickr web addresses and choose the extension you want to use to share your photos. The web address will be http://www.flickr.com/photos/yourextension. This web address can’t be changed so choose carefully.
Example: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderoftech/
When you confirm your web address, you will have your very own Flickr website for your photos. You can share this link with others to show them your photos.
You can also connect your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and more. Find out additional information about sharing your photos from Flickr’s sharing Help page.
Deleting Photos
After your photos are uploaded to Flickr, you can delete them off of your phone. Be careful, any photos you delete from Flickr will also be deleted from your phone. But it may be easier for you to use Flickr than your phone to delete photos that you don’t want any more.
Bottom Line
Use Flickr to free up space on your phone, store your photos and share them with others.
Your Thoughts
Do you have a lot of photos on your phone? Do you worry about running out of space on your phone? Have you ever lost photos because they were on your phone and not backed up? Let us know in the Comments section below!
_______________________
WeMontage Update
If you’re looking for a creative way to display your photos, check out WeMontage. WeMontage – This Tech Has You Covered! shows how you can take your favorite photos and turn them into a collage on removable wallpaper.
We Montage now has smaller collage sizes available, you can get started with as few as 5-10 pictures. The smallest collage is now available for $69.99.
Don’t forget about the 20% off coupon for Wonder of Tech readers! Use WONDEROFTECH as your coupon code.
SignEasy Update
The people at SignEasyhave recently released an update to the Android version of their electronic signature app. Formerly known as EasySign when I reviewed the app in EasySign for Signing on the Go!, the app has received numerous updates since I wrote my review. Here is information about the SignEasy Android update from the developer:
- Single Sign On with Google credentials to speed up the login process.
- Support for popular Cloud storage services extended to allow customers to seamlessly access documents stored on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and Evernote.
- Support for international characters across 150 countries.
- New and completely free SignEasy Lite Account, which entitles users to sign 3 documents free each month.
You can download the new SignEasy Android app from Google Play.
1TB?? Wow … thats impressive. But I know soon we will have images of size 10-20mb and up, or even Lytro kinda images which take much more space. We are suckers at this, nothing is never too much for us. And this digital hoarding is the new obsession. We never watch anything, but just pile up. Imagine going through 1TB of photos, it will take you months. When will we do that?
So better, practice cleaning, do not upload those 27 snaps of the same sandwich you just ate. Its gone! History! Delete unnecessary images ruthlessly. And better yet, don’t share an album of 189 photos of your recent conference speech at TechCrunch Disrupt (trust me, they all look the same) to Facebook, and save some agony of your friends who have to go through it.
Oh … I guess its the Cynic Friday morning for me 🙂
(Great update of SignEasy, that app is a life-saver).
Hi iRewardChart, Excellent point that illustrates one of my principal tenets: just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Yes, I’m young enough to remember the days when you had to buy film and pay for pictures to be developed so you chose your snapshot subjects carefully. These days of free photos have led to a proliferation of repetitive shots. Cull your photo collection to emphasize quality over quantity. Pick your best shot and delete the rest.
Imagine trying to organize or scan through 2 million photos. The joy would be lost somewhere around the 479,316th photo.
That being said, how cool would it be if Dropbox or some other online Cloud service firm gave us 1 TB of storage for free for all of our documents! It would be great if Flickr started a trend in the Cloud.
1 TB?
That’s wicked awesome!
Flickr is definitely getting more visitors. I don’t use my phone for taking pictures (You already know, I don’t have a smartphone, so not point with this, but I could still take advantage of this feature – upload my other images and store them, a backup for my backup :D).
Thank you for sharing the news, Carolyn 🙂 Although I don’t know what Yahoo is thinking, they will definitely get more visitors, but 1 TB per customer..I suppose they are expecting a lot of people to not use 1 TB of space for photos, which is probably true.
Hi Jeevan, You’re absolutely right, you don’t need a smartphone to take advantage of this incredible amount of free space. Excellent point, Flickr doesn’t have to worry about actually providing that much space for everyone. Few people will actually use up that space, at least not initially.
IRewardChart is right, the space needed for each photo will continue to increase. But this is a very generous offer of free space in the Cloud
Wow, seriously wow! 1TB? Thanks for sharing this Carolyn. Just like the puppy picture you’ve captioned “Please don’t delete me” my son’s pictures pop up in my gallery all the time and it is really hard for me to delete any picture from my phone. Moreover to take one good shot of my son in a particular posture we literally take 10-20 pictures coz you know, kids don’t obey when you ask them to pose for a picture! So most of the images will come out shaken and terrible, but still there will be at least 6-7 images in place of ONE image lol.
I do a monthly backup where I transfer all the photos manually to my computer and it is still one of the most tedious tasks. Plus if I can have all the images online for free, then why should I store them in my computer?
Hi Jane, Seriously, 1 TB. You’re right, that kind of space can make a big difference in your life. Imagine never having to delete a picture because you don’t have enough space either on your phone or your computer!
If you have multiple great shots of your son, you can keep them. I completely agree with you, I hate deleting pictures of my girls, even the multiple ones. Hey, they’re only young once!
The Auto Upload feature of Flickr is very handy. Not only do you get the space on Flickr but you can transfer your pictures effortlessly. It would be heartbreaking to have that space and lose your photos because you didn’t have a chance to transfer them before your phone was lost or broken. I hope Flickr brings this feature to Android and iPad very soon!
I’m so glad this helped you Jane. Thanks for taking the time to let us know! 🙂
flickr is an interesting and best solution based area i have read many reviews about this is fruitful in all of them with your opinion will readily try this to get the latest one
Hi Sarah, I’m glad you are giving this a try. With 1 TB of free space for your photos, Flickr is not giving you any reasons not to try this!
This is a highly informative article. I will surely try Flickr. Thanks for sharing.
Hi Ravish, I’m happy you were helped by this article. Enjoy your free Flickr space! 🙂
Well this is a winner Carolyn, okay, another one!
I didn’t realize we could transfer our photos from our phone there. Now I don’t have tons of photos yet because as you know, I just got my iPhone this past March. But what I do is I copy them to my computer but I have an external hard drive that I save them too. I’m always going through them because I do take them for a reason.
This just might be a much easier solution though so thanks for this share. I’m going to sign up and give it a whirl.
Have a great weekend Carolyn and thanks again.
~Adrienne
Hi Adrienne, Yes, even though you don’t have a lot of photos on your iPhone yet, you should get the Flickr app and sign up for Auto Uploads. Even if you keep your other ways of backing up your photos, this is automatic so you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself.
There really isn’t a reason not to do this, even if you don’t need a lot of space. Backing up your pictures is so very important and this is a very effective way of doing that.
I’m so glad you’re signing up for this, Adrienne!
Oh my word Carolyn, 1TB of space for free!
I’ve been using Dropbox to backup my photos but I could equally move them to Flickr. I don’t have that much storage space with Dropbox and I back up my blog there to so this is a great alternative.
My wife is terrible for taking hundreds of pictures and when I updated her iPhone to iOS7 I noticed that almost half of her iPhone’s storage was taken up by photos. She could really use Flickr, huh?
Hi Tim, Yes, I had been using Dropbox too. I like their compatibility with other apps, websites and services. But earning extra space is tough so if we can get our photos off of Dropbox, then we can free up a lot of space for documents and other data.
Yes, your wife could make great use of Flickr, Tim! I hope she enjoys her free space. 🙂
Carolyn,
I had no idea that Flickr offered that amount of storage either. Thanks so much for sharing this with us. I’ve passed this on to my husband. (He’s the photographer in the family. I need to shoot about 20 pictures to get one!)
Hi Sherryl, Yes, it sounds as if both you and your husband could each use this free Flickr space! Hey, why not, it’s free, right?
I’m so glad this was helpful to you, Sherryl. Thanks for letting us know that. 🙂
Wow! How did I miss this with Flickr? I use it all the time, have an account that I put up photos for sharing in Creative Commons, but never thought to load other “non-share” photos. And my iPhone is full because of all those photos! This sounds like an easy solution to gaining more space on my phone while not losing my photos.
Hi Carol, You’re right, this is a very easy solution to your storage space issue on your iPhone, especially if you use the Auto Upload feature. That’s great that you already use Flickr so setting this up will be very easy for you. :-bd
Oh, I’m still sick about losing hundreds of photos that somehow transferred from my PC to my iPad during syncing. There’s no way to delete those pictures individually, because only pictures that I physically uploaded onto my iPad could be deleted that way. I found a suggestion online and decided to try it on a small number of photos that I didn’t mind losing. Uh oh! Instead of those pics disappearing, all the other ones did. So problem solved, right? BUT, when I went to find those pictures on my PC, they weren’t there, either! I still don’t know what happened, but my guess is that it had something to do with a default setting for Photostream that I didn’t even know existed. Why not at least give people a warning that if they delete a picture from your service that it will be deleted from other devices, too?
Hi Ellen, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I’m so very sorry that happened to you. I have heard of others losing photos to iCloud when they synced them there. Do you live near an Apple Store? Perhaps you could take your iPad in there to see if there is anything they can do.
I hope you get a chance to use Flickr to store your photos if you are able to retrieve them.
I have been using Flickr for some of my clients, but never for personal use. I have mostly been using iPhoto and I have been sharing images via iCloud and sometimes via Dropbox if some of my friends want the pictures. Flickr has been working great for my clients, so I might have to try it myself as well 🙂
Hi Jens, Yes, there is a risk of spreading your photos out over different storage services. You may not remember which photos are where so your attempts to organize your photos may make life much more complicated.
With 1 TB of storage available on Flickr you can keep all of your photos in one place. Very handy! :-bd
Hi Carolyn,
I headed right over to Flickr and added you as a contact. You’ve got some great pics over there!
I’ve had my account for years but it looks got there way before me.
Thanks for the link to the Android app and hopefully we’ll get the auto update feature soon too. Wonderful post, packed with tons of useful stuff.
Thanks!!
Hi Ileane, Thanks for adding me as a friend on Flickr. That’s another great reason to sign up for the service!
I also hope that Flickr expands Auto Update. I predict they will after they have had the feature for the iPhone for a while.
Hi Carolyn !
Well , i’m a huge fan of Flickr . I already have an account with flickr and i’ve uploaded 1000’s of images to my account . Those images are of my family and i didn’t want to loose any of them . Due to its vast popularity and huge free storage , i uploaded all my photo’s to flickr . Thanks for sharing the information .
-Pramod
Hi Pramod, That’s great that you are already a Flickr user. You don’t have to worry about running out of free space now!
Thanks for sharing your experience with Flickr here with us today, Pramod. 🙂
Thanks for this tip, Carolyn – I don’t use my phone that much for taking pictures, but on the few occasions when I get snap-happy, the limited storage on the phone can be a pain, and this sounds like a good solution.
Cheers! Another great share 🙂
Hi Susan, Yes, phones can fill up quickly with photos so it’s important to get those photos off of your phone. Photos on your phone are also vulnerable to becoming lost if your phone is lost or broken. Flickr can solve both of these problems and you don’t have to worry about running out of space!
Last time I got crash my hard disk and lost my all pictures, 🙁 then I started online backup on Dropbox and Picasa but filckr is providing comparative more space, I think 1 TB is more than enough for me.
Hi Coleman, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I am so sorry that happened to you. That’s one of the dangers of having digital photos: losing them when something goes wrong. But Flickr is making it very easy to preserve your pictures by giving you 1 TB of free space and by including Auto Upload in their iPhone app.
If you get your pictures off of Dropbox then you will have much more space for other stuff. :-bd
Hey Carolyn, Flickr is really good tool, but need some time to get familiar with all function as you mentioned about auto update by iPhone app. thank you very much for this article 🙂 , I am really excited to use it.
You’re right, Coleman, any site takes some getting used to but I’m glad you’re enjoying Flickr.
I really should write a review of Flickr because I get a lot of questions from readers about how to use it. They recently updated their site and it works quite differently now.
yes,.,, i use flickr too,,. it’s so simple and fast…
Hi Lowongan, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! It’s wonderful to hear from a fellow Flickr fan. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us here.
Hey Carolyn, I am glad you came up with a solution for this too. I mean we all go through this pain of choosing which pictures to keep. No matter how good and special each picture is, when it comes to saving the mobile space we become a bit harsh. Thanks a lot for the help.
Hi Rey, You’re right, Flickr can save you from the pain of having to choose which pictures to keep. Keep ’em all! Why not? You have plenty of space of Flickr and it’s free!
Hi Carolyn,
Comprehensive breakdown here! Yes I do use Flickr; one problem on the road though….slow upload times for images. When I return to a faster connect in the States I will certainly use it again.
Thanks for sharing!
Ryan
Hi Ryan, Good point, images do take a lot of bandwidth to transfer so it’s best to upload them when you have a high speed Internet connection.
Hi Carolyn,
This might be useful. I’m going to have an Android phone soon. I won’t take many photos with it, but it’s useful occasionally. I keep changing my mind about which phone to have, but I think I have decided now. It costs too much but is dual core and takes 2 sims too, so it might be OK for me. I’m still getting used to my Nikon and trying to take photos in this terrible weather without automatic settings!
Hi Mike, Yes, Flickr could be a great solution for your photo storage needs. With 1 TB of space you could use Flickr for storage and back ups of your photos. If you got an Android phone you could save your photos directly to Flickr without having to upload them to a computer first. Very handy!
Great Article! I Will try Flickr, Thanks For Sharing.
Hi Prashant, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! I’m so glad you found this article to be helpful. Thanks for stopping by and letting us know. 🙂
I think its the best photo storage site.. I was looking for the same and now the search is over.
Hi Kunal, Welcome to The Wonder of Tech! If you’re looking for a photo site that gives you loads of free space, then look no further than Flickr!