Flickr

Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 11 Jul 2005 06:53:24 GMT

My poor laptop’s hard drive has been filling up with unprocessed photos again, so I took a couple hours this morning to organize things and offload them to my home fileserver. I’ve never been all that happy with my web-based photo gallery, but I haven’t been willing to spend the week or two that it’d take to write something better, and I haven’t found an open-source gallery program that works any better for me then what I have now.

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Sophie looking cute

So, I decided to give Flickr another try. Part of this was motivated by the Typo’s Flickr sidebar plugin–it’s the closest thing I can get to photo gallery/blog integration, and that’s something that’s been on my to-do list for around two years.

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Rusty and Colton at Whistler

Since I use iView Media Pro for organizing my photos, I wanted to find something that could automate the process of getting pictures from iView into Flickr. A bit of searching found PictureSync, which isn’t perfect, but it works well enough for now. I can select a block of pictures in iView and drag them to PictureSync’s icon, and it will convert them to sRGB, scale them down, extract metadata from iView to stuff into Flickr tags, and then upload the whole batch. Unfortunately, it seems to have keychain issues that force me to re-create my Flickr upload settings every time I run it, and it’s not all that great at extracting metadata from iView’s “people” field. Still, it’s easier to use PictureSync and Flickr then it was to copy files to my server and re-run my make-album script, and that’s good enough for me.

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Extreme cyclist at Whistler

So, I paid Flickr $25 to upgrade my account to “pro” status, which ups my upload limit from 20 MB to 2 GB and started uploading blocks of pictures. It’s going kind of slowly (550 MHz G4s aren’t all that great at resizing multi-megabyte images), but there’s no way around that for now. Eventually, I’ll probably write a Ruby upload script to work around the problems with PictureSync, and then I’ll be able to do uploads from a faster Linux box, but I’m pretty happy with what I have for now. It’s good enough.

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A Walrus at the Zoo

In celebration of getting out of the photo hosting business, here are a few random pictures. First, Sophie looking cute, then my brother and his youngest son, my family watching a walrus at the zoo, and a mountain biker in Whistler.

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Comments

  1. Jacob said 1 day later:

    The keychain issue was solved under 10.4 with the latest release. However on 10.3 there is an incompatablity with personal certificates - you need to move them to another keychain. Send feedback if you continue to have trouble.

  2. Scott Laird said 1 day later:

    Er, okay, apparently I’ve found a new keychain problem with 10.4, then. I’m seeing a lot of weird stuff happening with PictureSync; I’ll post a bug report later today.

  3. Sean said 13 days later:

    Seeing that bobsled, (is that what it’s called?) reminded me of my childhood. I have memories of stopping at a place that looked much like that somewhere on the highways of Southern B.C. I don’t remember exactly where, as I think I was about 10 years old. Where was this picture taken?

    Pretty fun to see stuff like that as I browse around random weblogs.

  4. Scott Laird said 13 days later:

    That picture was taken at Whistler, in southern BC. I don’t know if it’s the same place.

  5. Cheng Gao said 5 months later:

    zoto.com (like flickr.com) provides 2G storage for free. If Typo can have a zoto macro like flickr one, it’ll be amazing. As a RoR newbie I have no idea to do this. Maybe some guru can have a try.

  6. denis said 11 months later:

    Great tools ! I’m just trying iview and picture sync seems to be a good soft in addition of iview !

    thanks. Denis.

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