How to Migrate Your Photos from Flickr to SmugMug

Open the migration window

From the menu bar, go to File → Migrate From... (or press Cmd+Shift+M).

This opens the Migrate Content window. Select Flickr as your migration source.

Create a Flickr API app

The migration requires read-only API access to your Flickr account. Folio walks you through this:

1. Go to flickr.com/services/apps/create and sign in with your Flickr account
2. Choose Apply for a Non-Commercial Key
3. Enter any app name and description (e.g., "Folio Migration") and click Submit
4. You'll receive an API Key and Secret — copy both

Enter credentials and authorize

Back in Folio:

1. Paste your API Key and API Secret into the corresponding fields
2. Click Open Flickr Authorization... — this opens your browser where Flickr asks you to grant read-only access
3. After granting access, Flickr shows a verification code
4. Paste the verification code back into Folio and click Verify

A green checkmark with your Flickr username confirms you're authenticated.

Scan your Flickr library

Click Scan Library. Folio scans your entire Flickr account, including collections, albums, and any photos in your photostream that aren't in an album. A progress indicator shows which album is currently being scanned.

Review the migration preview

After scanning, you'll see a migration preview with summary cards showing the total number of folders, galleries, and files to migrate, along with a tree view of the planned SmugMug structure:

Flickr Migration/
├── Collection A/
│   ├── Album A1 (523 files)
│   └── Album A2 (89 files)
├── Album B (1,204 files)
└── Photostream (47 files)

A few things to be aware of:

• Auto-split — Albums with more than 4,990 photos are automatically split into numbered parts (e.g., "Big Album (Part 1)", "Big Album (Part 2)") because SmugMug has per-gallery limits
• Depth limit — SmugMug allows 8 levels of folder nesting. Items exceeding this are marked as skipped with an amber warning
• Privacy — All created folders and galleries are set to Private by default
• Duplicates — Automatically skipped, so it's safe to retry if the migration is interrupted

Start the migration

Click Start Migration. For each gallery, Folio performs three phases:

1. Create folder structure — The matching folder and gallery hierarchy is created on SmugMug
2. Download and upload — Original-resolution photos are downloaded from Flickr to a temporary folder, uploaded to the corresponding SmugMug gallery, and temporary files are cleaned up after each gallery completes
3. Patch metadata — Titles, descriptions, and tags from Flickr are applied to each SmugMug image

During migration, you'll see an overall progress bar with file count, elapsed time, and stats for galleries completed, files uploaded, metadata patched, and any failures. You can Pause to temporarily stop the upload, or Cancel Migration to stop everything and clean up temporary files.