How to Store Other Stuffs on Flickr

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As soon as Flickr announced the free space upgraded to 1TB,  people start to think what else we can store on Flick, in which I already mentioned that in my earlier post:
http://outdatedpenanguncle.blogspot.com/2013/05/flickr-is-now-1tb.html


Within 1 or 2 days, Reddit user rlaw68 posted the method that we can use on Windows, which is to hide any file behind a picture. Read about the detail at Reddit link below:
http://redd.it/1et454

That method is something similar that I used to transfer files across the pacific ocean. Since each sftp has it's cap speed, so I split a 1GB file into smaller chunks and transfer it with 10 xterms, there are a lot of manual works, but it is so much better to wait for an hour plus. With my method, I can transfers the 1GB from Penang to California within 10 to 15 minutes. Sometimes I have a dir with many more sub-dirs that is also more than 1GB, what I did was tar it, zip it and split it. After the files has been sftp to another side, just use cat to combine back the file, unzip and untar. Everything can be done within 20 minutes. Some other engineers didn't know this method, so they always ended up waiting one whole day just to transfer a 1GB tar file from Penang to California. If they have one week to complete the work, they used up 20% just to transfer file (1 week is 5 working days).

Back to this storing other files on Flickr, I tried it with hiding behind a gif file and also tried on jpg, both has been flag as error b Flickr. After a few times of trial and errors, I realized that maybe Windows is the problem. (Win7 64bit btw).

Since I have cygwin (a linux command prompt on Windows), so I switch to use cygwin, using the same method, but now is on cygwin, not Windows' command prompt. With just one attempt, it works! Flickr recognized it as the gif file and downloading it back prove that the file still can be use. There was another post on the wild wild web which was for MacOS. I would think MacOs would work, because MacOS is based on linux anyway.

So here is the method:

1. Install cygwin if you don't have it on your Windows. [It will be a long and painful process, download the setup file and run the setup file, wait for the setup file to download more file, but it was worth the waiting because I can run many file processing scripts on my Windows the way I wanted to on linux. ]
www.cygwin.com

2. Open cygwin, cd to the dir you want to hide the file behind the gif or jpg.

3. Do this command:
$ cat cover.gif Testing.zip > Testing.gif

4. Upload it to Flickr, and Flickr is happily show it as a picture file.

Done.

When you want to retrieve the file, click on the picture, choose to download original size of this photo. After the file is downloaded, open it with 7zip or WinRAR. WinZip will not works, which is why I have been using 7zip so many years that 7zip is the first software to install on every new Windows. To be exact, I don't install it, I just copied it from back up because it is portable!

Good luck!

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