I’ve been reducing the number of places I post stuff online, trying shift my blog into the main focus. I’ve been posting photos here, and videos. And consolidating my photoblog and ephemeral media stuff. And I realized that I still have a whole bunch of photos hosted on Flickr and embedded here. If my Flickr account disappears – say, if I decide to not renew my Pro account – then these photos will disappear from my blog posts. That’s not cool.
So I tried out [a plugin that sniffs the images embedded in posts](http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-linked-images-to-gallery-v01/), and automatically downloads a copy of the image to your own server, then modifies the html to point to the copy of the image stored in the blog rather than the one out in the ether. It can be set to only grab photos posted to Flickr, or all images not hosted on your own domain.
I just ran the batch process on my own blog. It grabbed 307 images from my Flickr account, copied them to my server, and updated the HTML on the posts. Automatically. Perfect. Now, if my Flickr account disappears for any reason, the images stay.
