iPhoto 2009 has a great feature embedded to automatically synchronize chosen picture folders with flickr.com.
The synchronization is two-ways, means that later changes in iPhoto will find their way into flickr.com and vice versa. This is in principle a great feature but if you want to hold older photos on flickr only (this is what I want to use flickr.com for) you are in trouble. Deleting these pictures either in iPhoto or on flickr.com will automatically delete them in the other repository as well. De-authorising iPhoto to synchronise to flickr.com might be a workaround, but it isn’t really smart and definitely quite complicated, as normally you want to continue to synchronise with flickr again in future.
The workaround I’m using and which I believe is quite reasonable is as follows:
For those sets on flickr, which I don’t want to keep in synchronisation with iPhoto any longer,
- I create a new set on flickr.com with a slightly different name
- I copy the pictures from the to-be-deleted set on flickr.com into this new set on flickr.com
- Afterwards I delete the old folder in iPhoto, which leads to a deletion of the same old folder on flickr.com too
- Done! Now I have still my pictures on flickr.com, but no link to iPhoto anymore
I’m glad to hear if anyone out there does know about another way how to stop automatic synchronisation between iPhoto and flickr.com.
