Probably not. The cloud is only reliable to a point where the company decides to sunset it. The fact that Flickr is owned by Yahoo! doesn’t help. They would probably not sunset one of their most valuable asset, but no one can say for sure.

You can never go wrong keeping a copy of all your Flickr photos offline, especially with the generous storage PCs come with these days.

Downloadr

We will be using Downloadr for this purpose. It’s a Windows-only photo downloader, completely free, and capable of downloading both public and private photos (after you have authorize it to do so).

Download Downloadr

How to backup

1. The first step is to authenticate Downloadr on your Flickr account. That would give permission to Downloadr to backup your private photos.

To do so, go to Extras > Authenticate.

2. Your browser will now fetch the Flickr account link page. There will be two “Next” button. Click the right one.

3. Go to Extras > Settings, check the “Try to get all photos” box.

4. Enter your Flickr username (your display username, not the one on your URL) and click “Search“. Doing this will fetch all photos from your Flickr account. If it doesn’t, click on the “Search more” button.

If you only wish to backup part of your Flickr photos, you can filter the result by date range, tags, fulltext, place, only Creative Commons or only Geotagged.

5. Once all your photos are fetched, hit Ctrl-A to select them all. All your photos will be highlighted after you have done so.

6. Click on the “Download selected” button.

There is no way to pause and resume your photo download. Keep your PC and connection on until the download is complete to avoid any interruption.

Otherwise you would have to manually repeat the steps above up to step 4, then manually select the remaining photos that are yet to be downloaded.

©2011 SheepTech

How-To: Backup Photos from Flickr to PC

Like Twitter, you can follow someone on Trunk.ly and view their shared links by clicking on the “Friend’s links” tab. If you want to keep your shared links only to yourself, just check the “Protect my links” checkbox on the settings page and you’re good to go.

According to Trunk.ly’s blog post, we will soon be able to add a link directly, making it a viable refugee camp for Delicious users if basic bookmarking service is all they need.

In fact, it’s possible to import links from Delicious from day one.

You may want to register yourself an account while the service is still in its infancy, before someone grabbed your vanity URL when it gets popular later.

The last thing Trunk.ly would want to do is to be acquired by Yahoo!

©2011 SheepTech

Trunk.ly Track Links You Posted on Social Networks

Microsoft has proposed to acquire Yahoo! at $44.6 billion, equivalent to $44,600,000,000 or about 27 YouTubes. Read more about it at:

• Microsoft PressPass
• TechCrunch
• Microsoft CEO’s Internal email to Microsoft employees

It’s funny to see things run as time goes. Back in 1998, Google’s co-founders, Larry and Sergey once contacted Yahoo! to sell their search engine technology. Yahoo! founder, David Filo, then encouraged them to grow the service themselves by starting a search engine company instead.

“When it’s fully developed and scalable,” he told them, “let’s talk again.”

But today, Google is the one who has the most U.S. search market share, at 58.4%. Microsoft and Yahoo! is still being left behind even if they successfully combined.

©2011 SheepTech

Microsoft Offer $44.6 Billion to Acquire Yahoo!