The quest for a Flickr uploader ends

After much searching, I've finally managed to set up a decent uploader for Flickr on my Linux laptop. Initially, like practically everyone, I guess, I started off using Flickr's web interface to upload photos. While that worked well for a small number of photos, you do get bandwidth conscious when using the web interface. Thus began my quest for a good Flickr uploader for Linux.

The first thing I did was check out the official Flickr Uploadr, which is available only for Windows and Mac OS X. Happily, the source code is available under the LGPL, so I downloaded it and tried compiling it. This turned out to be more complicated than I'd bargained for, and since I didn't have the time, I added it to my burgeoning list of future projects.

Next up, I tried using KFlickr, KDE's Flickr uploader. I liked this as I could set all Flickr options including licenses, and even resize the image before uploading it. Unfortunately, since Ubuntu Karmic has moved to KDE4, thumbnails weren't working, as KFlickr at the time still used KDE3 libraries, as described in this bug. Anyone who's tried to figure out which pic is which based on the usual digicam naming schemes, will know that it's practically impossible without thumbnails.

So, for a while I used Postr, the Flickr uploader for Gnome. While it is pretty good, it doesn't have all the features that KFlickr has.

Recently, I decided to have another crack at it, and tried out jUploadr, which is built using Java, so it runs everywhere. However, it's not been developed since 2007, and it shows. It has about the same feature set as Postr, and I couldn't get it to upload the only time I tried.

Rather despondent I checked out the aforementioned bug, and noticed that a new version of KFlickr with KDE support is out. It's not an official Ubuntu release yet, but you can get it from this PPA. Importantly, thumbnails work, and uploading so far has been a breeze.

Now, to finish uploading that massive backlog of photos...