I have become a huge fan of Flickr over the last year and a half. I've really enjoyed looking at other people's photos and uploading photos of my own. I currently have about 3,500 photos on my account and I have spent a lot of time organizing and labeling those photos.

I have been concerned about having all of my photos locked up in Flickr for some time now. There are a lot of great people in the Flickr community but I don't like having all of my photos locked up in a proprietary system. I don't mind having my photos on there but I also like to have the exact same data in an open format on my hard drive. I used to keep a separate copy of my photos on my hard drive but that copy was not organized as nicely as the photos on my Flickr account.

There have also been times when I wanted to make CDs of a few sets for friends. Flickr does not have an interface that allows you to download all of your photos at once. There are services that allow you to order DVDs of your photos but I have not been happy with those DVDs. I also don't like the idea of having to order DVDs to get a backup of my photos.

I've found a few programs that would backup a Flickr account but some of them would truncate the title and not show the description. I wanted a program that would download all of my sets and store the information about each photo in a XML file. I could not find a program that would do that so I wrote my own. I also wanted something simple that would run under Linux.

FlickrDownload is written in C#. It uses the FlickrNet API library to communicate with Flickr. The package also includes some XSLT stylesheets that will generate HTML files with your photos.

I developed this program under Debian GNU/Linux and I use Mono to compile and run the application. It should also run under Windows with no problems. I have not tested this application under Windows though.

Brian Masney http://www.flickr.com/photos/masneyb/sets