About a year ago, I upgraded to Flickr Pro which comes with unlimited storage.  I wanted to remove the 200 photo cap on my account and also use Flickr as a photo backup system (I’ve since purchased Mozy for backups).

This is the old flickr organizr

So I upgraded, and started uploading pooploads of photos (marked private) from years gone by.  Things went smoothly except for the occasional crash of the various 3rd party bulk uploaders (maybe this is a way to help curb excessive storage).  One of the annoyances, however, was that I now had thousands of photos in my photostream that prevented me from seeing recent, non-backup photos.  After some internetting, I found a decent solution–you can change the upload date of your photos (you can also change the “taken on” date of your photos in the same fashion).  It seems like there’s some intentional pushback from Flickr to include this as a real feature, so for now here are two mildly unfriendly but usable methods:

Old Flickr Organizer is flickr’s old organizer.  It’s a bit slow and sometimes forgets what it’s doing.

1. Put the photos you’d like to change the date of into a set (if you want to update a group of photos).  Note that you can change the date of up to 500 photos at a time.
2. Go to the old organizer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/organize/?old=1
3. Click on the the set or select the photo you’d like to change
4. Under batch edit, click “Dates” (the “Dates” link might be partially hidden by the set thumbnail)
5. Check the box “Change Dates Posted” and select the date and time you’d like the photo(s) to have been posted
6. Click “DOOOOO IT!”
7. You’ll see it tick off each date change one by one.

h4ppierphotos is a full featured but very raw organizational tool that uses flickr’s API to make date changes.

1. Open h4ppierphotos
2. Allow h4ppierphotos to access your photo stream by granting it permission on flickr
3. Click the “Very h4ppy” radio button at the top in order to access advanced date features
4. Set search parameters for the photos you’d like to date-change
5. In display preferences, check the “show date uploaded” box so that you know when each photo was uploaded
6. Click the “Search all photos” button.  If you’re searching for hundreds of photos, it may take a while to load
7. Determine the desired upload date and calculate in hours, days or years how much time you’d like to add or subtract.  Enter this next to the “Time shift the upload date of these photos” button
8. Click “Time shift the upload date of these photos”.  It may take several minutes to process all date changes

There you have it…two ways to restore order (literally) to your photostream!