How to Use Flickr’s 1TB of Free Space to Store More Than Pictures
With the availability of a whopping 1TB of storage space now available to users on Flickr, it wasn’t long before someone out there found other ways to put 1TB of storage space to good use. That is to say, the uploading of files other than images.
That’s just what Redditor rlaw68 has done, allowing the user to upload packaged files by essentially tricking the Flickr servers into thinking you’re merely uploading an image. The process involves putting two files in one folder, a GIF image (though some users have been able to do this with other image file extensions) and an archive file (such as a .zip or .rar), followed by combining them to create what only appears to be an image file.
Upon uploading, Flickr will just check the file header to see if it’s an image file, unaware that there’s a package of other data attached.
To retrieve the content after uploading, the user will have to download the full-resolution version from Flickr, rename the file to a .zip or .rar (whichever is appropriate, as uploaded), and well, that’s it.
Here are the instructions for Windows users posted by rlaw68:
1) Put the two files you want to combine into a single folder, preferably off the root of your drive, say c:\combos
2) Hit the Windows key + R, type in CMD and hit Enter
3) Change the directory to the root:
C:\users\Bill>cd \
4) And then to the folder where your files are:
C:>cd combos
5) Now, to combine the files type:
C:\combos>copy /B project1.zip+cat.gif project1.gif
6) That’s it! Now you’ll see a file called project1.gif in your \combos folder that you can upload and store on Flickr – it’ll appear as just whatever the .gif file was that you combined with your archive.
What about when you want to download it?
1) Right click on the .gif and choose view all sizes: original
2) Click on Download the Original size of this photo
3) Once it’s downloaded, rename it with the .zip or .rar extension that the embedded file had, open it in your archive program and you’ll see the contents of your archive (it seems that you need to use either 7-zip or WinRAR to open this – WinZip doesn’t seem to like this method).
A WonderHowTo guide is available for MAC users, as well. The process is similar, but uses MAC’s Terminal to get the job done.
It should be noted that Flickr does have a 200MB-per-file upload limit, so this isn’t quite the best solution if you’re looking to dump your other backup solutions and upload huge amounts of data. It’s also important to recognize that Flickr may patch this up in the near future, if they have not already.
(via Reddit via Lifehacker)
