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A little backstory.
I've been a Flickr advocate for quite a few years. I joined back in May 2005 and have been a Pro (paid) member ever since. I've uploaded every digital photo I've got, partly to share with friends and partly as an offsite backup. $24.99 a year seems like a pretty good deal for unlimited photo storage.
Although recently my opinion has changed. Flickr released a native iPhone app, and more recently even a Windows Phone 7 app. Being an Android fanboy, I was waiting for the native app, but it never came. I also get the feeling Flickr would prefer all their users to be the elitest photographer types that seem to frequent the forums, and not a dumping ground for my photos of drunken nights out, which are only of interest to my circle of friends.
Flickr just doesn't feel like it fits my needs anymore so I've decided to move to Picasa. It's already part of my Google account, it has a desktop app that is ok (not great, but does the job) and the new Google+ integration was the deal clincher. Plus it syncs to my Android Gallery app from the get-go.
I have most of my photos backed up on my Drobo FS, but there's a few sets of photos that only live in my Flickr account and unfortunately they don't employ the same data liberation mentality as Google.
My solution.
I wrote a tiny Ruby on Rails app, based off a couple of great gems. Fleakr, a gem to talk to the Flickr API and AWS-S3 to talk to Amazon. It was purely intended to run locally to pull photosets down in the original size and stick them into an Amazon S3 bucket.
Surprisingly a couple of friends showed an interest so I intend to take it a little further with download to Dropbox support and being able to authorise your Flickr account from the UI rather than in the code.
