And the free tool that I wrote that will help you do it too!
My quest to migrate 86,144 photos and videos from Flickr to Google Photos
I've been using Flickr to store my photos and videos since around 2012. However recently I've taken the Google One subscription and so have 2Tb storage in there. Bit pointless to be paying twice, so I figured I might as make the effort and migrate the photos and videos.
Flickr is really a photographers presentation site, for good or aspiring photographers to present their work to the world - it always was - not really what I was using it for; which was to keep my home photos and videos there - largely without displaying any of them publically.
Flickr doesn't have the same capabilities that Google Photos does now in terms of photo "touch-up" like "remove this person", or the face-recognition, OCR text finding tech etc.
Google Photos is just a lot quicker to access too. Maybe Flickr servers are all in the States, or maybe they don't have connectivity to the internet as good, but when I scroll through previous years Flickrs thumbnails take ages to appear, whereas Google Photos is more or less instantaneous.
So ta-ta! So long and thanks for all the fish.
I mean... how hard can it be? Well I found it really hard. I had nearly 100,000 media files in Flickr taken over the last 20 years or so.
Flickr removes the latitude and longitude from your images - and I didn't want to lose that meta-data...
I tried creating a Flickr app, and the using the API to download, and then immediately upload the photo or video to Google Photos.
This works OK for most media files, but I simply could not get it to work for some videos that were set to "private" in Flickr.
There are already a multitude of ways to migrate from Flickr to Google Photos, but as far as I can see, either they aren't free or won't work 100% on larger datasets (will not be able to handle Google Photo's 10,000 a day upload limit for example).
Rice Drive
Has a blog entry on how to transfer. Does seem simple enough to setup.
In order to transfer my 500gb of data it would cost around $10
Multi-Cloud
Has a blog entry on their transfer options
They only offer 200gb a month, so it would take 3 months at $17.99 a month to do the transfer. $53.97 total.
Antrix Github
https://github.com/antrix/flickr-to-google-photos
Is a Python app like mine, except that it only processes Flickr Albums, not the data dump.
You will also need the credentials.json like my version
PicBackMan
PicBackMan is a downloadable program like mine.
It's $99 for the unlimited version. The basic only does 500 photos.
They do appear to offer a Free Trial, so maybe you can do it quickly without cost.
It's not going to be walk in park, especially if you've got 1000s of photos and videos. But if you paying $80 or more a year to Flickr, then you going to have to make some effort