With the news that Microsoft may one day end up controlling Flickr, were it to succeed in acquiring Yahoo, now might be a good time to make a backup of you Flickr images. Actually, even without any Microsoft paranoia, now is always a good time to make a backup — just in case.
We've posted a couple ways to back up your Flickr data in the past, but Flickrfs is perhaps the slickest I've used. Flickrfs is a virtual filesystem which mounts your Flickr account on a Linux machine, allowing you to browse through your photos as if they were on a locally connected drive.
Flickrfs only works on Linux and it has a few dependancies (FUSE and Python bindings) but there are step-by-step installation instructions available for Ubuntu as well as other distros.
Once you have it installed and set up, mounting your Flickr account with Flickrfs will retrieve information about your Flickr photos and you can interact with them as you would any other mounted volume. Dragging photos from your local machine to the mounted Flickr volume will automatically upload them to your Flickr account.
Backing up images already on Flickr works the same way — just copy the files from Flickrfs to your local machine, and it will download your images.
It doesn't get a whole lot simpler than that. If you enjoy mounting external sites and interacting with them via your desktop environment, just out BlogFS, a FUSE filesystem that mounts your WordPress blog or WikipediaFS (previous coverage) which does the same for Wikipedia.
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