Recently, a strange and magical event (slip of the finger, some would allege) mean that the Poorhouse had cause to attempt to download all of the inane pictures that constitute his Flickr account.

The (or rather 'a') great beauty of Flickr, as opposed to the evils of Facebook et al, is that it does preserve your original photos - but it is a mission and a half if you want to download them all back to your computer en masse. It is significantly less hard however if you use FlickrEdit.

It's a free Java program (using FlickrJ's implementation of the Flickr API) so works wherever a suitable variant of Java does, and in fact can be launched right from your web browser via Java Web Start.

More importantly, what it does. Well, to c & p the official page:

* Display your Flickr Photos and Sets
* Display your Not in Set, Recent, Favorites, Contacts and Group photos
* Search photos based on date and tag
* Backup your Flickr Photos and Sets
* Backup Title, Description, Tags, and Copyright and store them into the IPTC header of the images.
* Upload new photos to Flickr (including asynchronous upload)
* Edit Photo and Set info, add comments to Photos and Sets
* Rotate photos
* Delete photos or Sets
* View a photo or selected photos slideshow
* Switch between multiple Flickr users

The Poorhouse, not being the biggest active Flickr user, was only really that interested in the backing-up functionality, which allows you to specify which photos and/or sets you're interested in and download them all to your hard disk immediately (or as immediately as the speed of your internet connection works), arranged neatly in folders corresponding to sets. And it works, just lovely. It did seem "safer" to download the bigger sets one at a time, but that is more than likely due to the dodgy connection the Poor-computer runs on rather than the software, which seems eminently usable and stable.

Recommended to all picture losers everywhere. Thank you sunkencity.