JulianSchrader.de

How to Upload Photos to Flickr: 5 Tools Compared

Every single picture I take with my DSLR or iPhone ends up in the iPhoto Library on my MacBook Pro. After sorting out and a little bit of editing in Photoshop the pictures sit there and — well, many of them get uploaded to flickr to share them with friends.

Flickr offers a simple web interface for uploading and it’s okay as long as you’re only uploading one, two or maybe three pictures at once. Everything above that number makes it a cumbersome process and handling large sets is not only pretty difficult but simply an annoying task. Alternatives?

Photonic

A Flickr Desktop Client for Mac OS X

Working with a lot of photos to upload can be a pain, especially with any sort of web-based interface. No matter how well-designed the interface is, you’re still in a web browser and suffer from the limitations therein. The answer to effectively organizing and uploading tens, or even hundreds, of photos to Flickr is to use a desktop application specifically designed to help you accomplish this task. Enter Photonic.

Photonic is pretty popular at the moment — it just came out in version 1.0 and works a circuit through the blogosphere. In addition to uploading pictures Photonic also works as a flickr browser, which makes it very nice and easy to explore your contacts’ pictures — even without internet access, as Photonic caches the pictures.

Upload: Just drag and drop photos into Photonics, edit title, description and a few more options and you’re ready to hit upload. Everything’s nice and cleaned up — an interface like what we’re used to on the Mac…

But of course there’s a downside as well: Photonic is no freeware, you can get a license for 20 bucks until March 15th, whatever that may mean

→ http://photonicapp.com/

Skitch

Skitch.com + Skitch = fast and fun image sharing.

Skitch.com is a webservice that works hand in hand with our application Skitch to give you 1-click uploading of images for fast and fun image sharing.

First of all, Skitch is a great tool for productivity freaks. If you’re working together with other people, and most likely you are, you probably have to explain them a lot of what you see on your screen. Skitch makes it easy — it’s running in the background and therefore it’s instantly there when you need it. Hit [Cmd] + [Shift] + [5], take a screen snap and annotate it easily — Skitch offers a wide variety of tools to do so.

Then drag the dragging tab into a chat window or e-mail or click the Webpost button to upload it to skitch.com. Or flickr! Skitch is able to upload to a variety of services, including the one we’re searching upload tools for.

And guess what — Skitch doesn’t only do snapshots of what’s on your screen, you can also drag and drop pictures from iPhoto or anywhere else to annotate and upload them. It’s currently available for free in public beta and works like a charm.

Downside: There’s no possibility to set details such as tags and description before uploading, Skitch unsuitable for mass uploads.

→ http://skitch.com/

FFXPorter

Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto Plugin

A free iPhoto export plugin for Flickr. This provides a convenient way to upload your iPhoto descriptions, titles, keywords (tags), and ratings along with your photos. It also supports sets (yay!) and preserves GPS tags and other EXIF data.

There’s nothing I could add to the description above — this is exactly what it does. It’s easy to install, uploads your pictures right from the Export dialogue within iPhoto and that’s it. Perfect as long as your titles and descriptions should be the same across flickr and iPhoto. Less perfect if you want to edit them before uploading — there’s no way other than changing the values saved in your iPhoto Library.

If you want to share many pictures, think twice before hitting Upload — you won’t be able to use iPhoto as long as this plugin is working!

→ FFXPorter

Flickr Uploadr

Flickr’s Official Upload Tool

Download the Flickr Uploadr to drag in photos from your computer, add titles, tags and other metadata and upload them all to Flickr.

Just as FFXPorter before, it does what the short description says. Since I’m a Mac user I won’t talk about the Windows Vista/XP version, but Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X 10.5 is my favourite uploading tool.

It’s free of charge, easy to use and has a great feature I haven’t seen in other tools yet: Sometimes my internet connection fails briefly — but Flickr Uploadr 3.0 remembers which pictures it already transferred and is able to continue uploading afterwards.

→ Flickr Uploadr 3.0

Flickr to go

Sometimes you think you need to upload pictures to flickr while you’re on the way and don’t have access to a computer running any of the above-mentioned tools. Flickr thought of this use case as well and gives us the possibility to upload pictures by e-mail. In case you’re on a jailbroken iPhone, I recommend using SendPics to send full-resolution images (usually the iPhone scales down pictures before e-mailing them).

PS: Add your flickr RSS feed to TwitterFeed to let your friends know when you uploaded a new picture!

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