As bandwidth and download limits sky rocket, rich media is taking over the world. Media and entertainment companies are (mostly) embracing this trend, but there are ever increasing opportunities for users to contribute. Flickr is arguably the most ideal way to host and share photos and videos, with the site’s tour making this claim:

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world.

As I followed the “Magical Feature Tour”, I continuously asked myself, “Why on Earth are all my photos in Facebook?!”

Ok, so that really is a rhetorical question. The power of social networking is huge, and to get anyone to check out another site it would have to be a pretty amazing photo of me exposing Hannah Montana’s real identity. (Sorry folks, I’m not that lucky!) So we have to live with Facebook’s flaws, including the lack of automatic tagging and low resolution images. The real problem though isn’t the photos I upload, but other people’s photos of me.

Back in the olden days, when someone took a photo of me on their Sony Mavica camera, they’d just whip out the floppy and I’d take a copy. As technology advanced and you could take more than 10 photos a night, we progressed to sharing the weekend’s snaps on a compact disk. It worked great, and means I still have those photos of me dressed up as Elvis from when I was 16. (Yes, this is full resolution!)

So what are my options today? I could email all of my friends and ask them to email the photos back to me one by one. That’d take waaaayyy too long, and I don’t necessarily want to have that level of contact with some of my Facebook friends. I could go through every photo, right click, Save Image As…, etc, but that doesn’t sound like my idea of a fun evening!

Well I’ve discovered FacePAD, a Firefox Add-on which is a Facebook album downloader. Once you install it (making sure you have default download location configured for Firefox), you just right click on a link to an album and choose “Download Album with FacePAD”.

The extension will whiz into action, and download each of the photos in the album. UPDATE: So it turns out it only downloads the photos on the first page of the album, and you have to repeat the right click action for each subsequent page. The files will be in your preconfigured download directory, helpfully named with random numbers, and placed in the middle of the rest of your files.

Mmm yeah, it’s pretty rough. Instead of asking for donations, perhaps the developer could spend some of his time cleaning things up a bit. However it does what I need, and I now have a simpler way of getting a copy of my embarrassing memories. I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough to motivate me to do it regularly, but is there anything else I can do?