How to Download All of your Flickr Photos on a Mac

This detailed guide will explain how to download all of your (or someone else’s) photos from Flickr using a small and completely free App.

I tested a number of “Flickr download” tools. This is the only one I could find that downloaded every one of my photos without problems or errors. It’s also worth mentioning that while this guide was initially published back in 2008, it still works in 2021 – in macOS Catalina and Big Sur.

1. Start by downloading Photo Grabbr. The installation is typical for most macOS Apps – just drag the file to your Applications folder.
2. Launch the Photo Grabbr app.
3. Select Photo Grabbr from the top menu, and then Preferences from the drop-down menu.
4. From here you’ll want to select the size of the photos to download. There are a lot of options, but if you want the highest quality select Original from the Download the __ size of the photo list. The default location where your files will be saved to is a folder named Photo Grabbr on your Desktop. If you’d like to change that location to another folder, click the Choose… button. When you’re done, close the Preferences panel.
5. Make user Username is selected from the Look up pull-down menu, enter your Flickr user name (or the username that corresponds with the images you want to download) in the space provided, and then click the Search button.
6. If you don’t want to download all of the images, select the folders you do want to download and then click the Download button. Otherwise, click the Download All Photos button.
7. It took less than 30 minutes to download 2000 images from my Flickr account, quite a few of which were rather large in size. The download time will vary on your Internet connection speed, the number and size of your photos.
8. Once the process has completed you’ll see a Done message in the bottom left corner.
9. That’s it! Check the folder where you opted to download your Flickr photos and make sure everything looks good.

Did you know you can automatically post your Flickr uploads to Facebook?