A lot of us use online photo sharing services like Flickr, all the original photos are actually still in your hard disk.  But when a disaster strikes, all these photos will be totally gone, whist it is a good idea to have photos stored online, a lot of computer geeks do not know that there is the possibility to backup photos down to your own personal computer.  All these free software will do the downloading of the photos automatically without you saving the individual photos one at a time.


BackupMyPics


BackupMyPics is a online backup service that requires payment, it will copy photos posted on websites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and Facebook to its servers hosted on Amazon Web Services.  The backups then can be downloaded to your personal computer or sent to another online photo sharing service.  One small issue will be the limited storage space set to only 1 GB limit which sounds pure bull to a lot of computer geeks since this service is a paid solution.  But this service allows backing up from multiple web services which a lot of other services do not offer


FlickrEdit


FlickrEdit is a piece of free software that is based on Java platform that allows you to transfer photos to and from Flickr.  You can even edit it on the fly before uploading it to Flickr.  Download FlickrEdit from sunkencity.org/flickredigt.  Start the program and login to Flickr and allow FlickrEdit to access your images.  Of course you must have Java installed in your computer in order to use this software.


Picasa


Picasa is another web based image sharing service by Google.  There is a desktop version of Picasa that you can download via picasa.google.com.  To backup your images in your Picasa web service, go to My Photos in Picasa Web Album and simply select the album you wish to backup and choose Download to Picasa below the Download tab.  The software will launch and you can click on Download to start backing up your images.

Even though not every single online web photo service is covered in this article, I suppose the  major sites that most people use are already mentioned the free softwares listed.  I hope this article on how to backup photos are useful for readers of this site.