How to Retrieve Photos From Flickr

Q. I’m deleting Yahoo and my Flickr account. In regards to Flickr, I still have most of the original images on my computer, but need to retrieve a handful of photos I can’t find on my hard drive. Can I download the Flickr copies in the original resolution, or will they be in a lower image quality?

You can download a copy of each photo at the original resolution in which it was uploaded. Log into your Flickr account and click on a photo in your collection to view it. In the lower-right corner of the viewer window, click the Download arrow icon. In the window that pops up, choose Original to grab the image in its highest resolution.

Flickr creates several resolutions of uploaded images for sharing purposes. These include small squares and thumbnail previews, as well as medium and large sizes for friends and family who might want to download copies of the pictures — but do not need the bigger original-resolution files. You can see the range of sizes available for a picture when you click the Download arrow and choose View All Sizes from the menu.

If you have more than just a few pictures to retrieve from Flickr, you can also download photos by the album, or in batches from your Camera Roll page. To download a set of full-resolution photos from the Albums page, move the mouse over an album’s thumbnail image and click the Download arrow. If you already have the album open, you can just click the Download icon under the album’s title.

To download images grouped together on your Camera Roll page, click the Select All button next to a series of pictures. When you have made your selections, click the Download button on the tool bar that appears at the bottom of the screen.

Third-party tools are available as well. Flickr Downloadr and Bulkr are two such programs found around the web.

Q. My MacBook Air is less than a year old, but the battery doesn’t seem to last as long as advertised and the laptop seems to really be working at something. How can I tell what it’s doing?

Apple builds battery-usage tools into its Mac laptops to help you monitor your portable power source, including the Battery Status menu. To see the Battery Status menu, click the small battery icon on the upper-right side of the Mac’s menu bar.

If you do not see a battery icon up there, click the System Preferences icon in the desktop dock, click the Energy Saver icon and click the box next to “Show battery status in menu bar.” You can also open the System Preference box from the Apple menu in the upper-left corner of the screen.

When you open the Battery Status menu, you can see basic information about the battery’s charge, along with a list of apps that are consuming a large portion of the power supply. Web browsers with open pages running a lot of video (or that constantly update themselves) are usually on the list, as are apps that run continuously in the background like Spotify.

To get a better idea of just how much of your juice these apps are guzzling, open the Activity Monitor app that came with your Mac. Go to the Applications folder, to Utilities, and double-click on Activity Monitor. In the Activity Monitor window, click the CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network tabs to see which programs are consuming the most resources in the respective areas.

To help free up your computer’s resources, quit greedy programs you are not using. Apple’s site has a page of tips for maximizing performance.