Transfer photos from Flickr to Picasa on your Mac

When I first started blogging, I purchased an unlimited Flickr account not only for blogging images storage, but also for personal photo storage. Lately I’ve been moving to Google services for all of my blogging needs. That meant moving my images from Flickr (my subscription is set to expire in one month anyway) to Picasa, and I have to say, the move has been an extreme productivity enhancer from a Blogger user’s standpoint (more on this in later posts).

Google made the notion of switching a bit more appealing recently by providing a couple of storage upgrade options that should make any photo-bug or blogger perk up and take notice:

• 20Gb of storage for $5 per year
• 200 Gb of storage (plus free 4Gb Eye-Fi card) for $50 per year

Being the gadget geek I am, I chose the 200 Gb (shared between Gmail and Picasa) of storage with the free Eye-Fi card. I can always downgrade my storage requirements next year if I find I didn’t use the 200 Gb. I probably won’t need that much cloud storage but, hey, I get the Eye-Fi card and that alone is worth $50.

Now the time consuming part; moving my images from Flickr to Picasa. Here’s the easiest way I have found on a Mac to move images from Flickr to Picasa. Take a look after the click.

Download Flickr Images:

First we need to get our images and photos out of the Flickr cloud and onto our desktops. Here’s how:

• Download Photo Grabbr from Malarkey Software (payment requested)
• Fire up Photo Grabbr
• Select Flickr | Authorize... from the pull-down menu – the default browser will load the Flickr authorization page
• Select the link to authorize Photo Grabbr access to your Flickr account
• Close the browser and return to Photo Grabbr
• Select Username from the Look up drop-down menu as shown in the image below
• Enter your Username in the text edit box – as shown in the image below, my username was my entire name

• Click the Search button – a list of your Flickr photosets will appear
• Select the photosets you want to download
• Click the Download button – Photo Grabbr will begin downloading the images to the Desktop (default location that can be changed using Photo Grabbr preferences) and organize them into folders using the photoset names; VERY convenient!

Alright. We have our photos liberated from Flickr. Now it is time to upload them to our Picasa account.

Upload to Picasa:
This step involves another download so let’s start with that process:

• Download the Picasa Web Albums Uploader (PWAU) for Mac (Free) – while on the page, check out the video to learn more about using this software and its included iPhoto integration
• Fire up PWAU
• Provide the login window with your Picasa (Google) account information and click the Sign-in button – the software is now ready to upload images
• Locate the folder within the Photo Grabbr folder on your desktop containing the images from the Flickr photoset you want to upload – you only need locate the folder
• Drag the folder into the left-side pane of the PWAU software – the window will populate with thumbnails of all the images in the folder as shown in the image below

• Click the New Album button – options to include a title, description, public access and captions will be provided as shown in the image above
• Add at minimum a Title (the rest is optional and can be added online later)
• Click the Scale large photos for: drop-down menu and select a size – choose the largest to maintain a high quality image that can be printed (you have 200Gb for Pete’s sake!)
• Click the Upload button – wait time varies based on number of images and size and PWAU provides a status window shown below

• When the images have been uploaded, PWAU will ask if you want to view your online Picasa Album as shown in the image below

• Click the View button and your default browser will load the uploaded photoset as shown in the image below

Take some time to verify your photos, add captions, change the order, add map locations or share with your family and friends.

Before someone mentions it, yes you could download the Picasa desktop software for Mac and use it to upload and organize your photos, but I am trying to move all my photos to a secure cloud location without the need to keep my own local digital copies (call me a fool, but I trust Google with my images).

There you have it, the quickest way I know to move your photos and images from Flickr to Picasa. Have a better solution (such as a Mac equivalent for the Migratr program for Windoze machines)? Leave a comment and add to this note. I would REALLY like to know. Gotta to run...have about 30 photosets to upload to Picasa!