A Flickr tool that is actually useful.
3,733 viewsWhile doing some of my daily blog reading I happened across a very insightful blog Using Photos to Build Inbound Links written by Matt McGee. This got me thinking of course that it would be extremely helpful to my company to take advantage of Flickr. So I began putting together the beginnings of my “plan of attack.” Select images that the public will make use of, simple enough. Find a tool that will help manage my interactions with Flickr, easy right? Wrong, I have played with many Flicker tools in the past, but all left something to be desired. So I began my search with a specific goal in mind, a tool that would allow me to sync my local images with those stored on Flickr without loosing any of the EXIF or other Metadata. Sounds simple enough right? Wrong. Lets take a look at a few of the Flickr upload/sync tools.
Flickr Uploadr
This is one of Flickr’s hosted tools found on the site. Pros:
- Very simple and easy to understand.
- Drag and Drop image uploading.
- Batch image manipulations and organization.
- Can do most of your image manipulation and organization offline
- Can handle multiple Flickr accounts.
- Resize Images.
- Can connect through proxy.
- Shows monthly MB Limit and overall batch MB size.
Cons:
- Seems to take a long time uploading. Uploading a 24k image will report in the status bar that 68k is being sent? Odd?
- FAQ is online.
- Does not sync with local folders.
jUploadr
Another of the tools offered on Flickr’s Tool page but check the developers page first as it seems to have the more recent version. Pros:
- Simple.
- Drag and Drop.
- Proxy Support.
- Edits all Flickr photo metadata.
- Tag assistance.
- Multiple Accounts
- Multiple Languages.
- Shows monthly MB limit and total MB uploaded.
- Image resize with options for higher quality, slower speed or lower quality, faster speed.
- Bandwidth Throttling.
Cons:
- Cross compatible with Windows Linux and OS X.
- The “Batch Editing” feature is clunky.
- The User Interface is too simple. It needs to have a few more latent options.
- Editing a images data is done through a popup.
FlickrSync
FlickrSync is a image synchronization tool that displays your local folders and your flickr sets. It allows you to manage all your images locally while letting the tool manage them on Flickr. Pros:
- The user interface is great. Double clicking on a image or a folder name will bring of the respective image or folder.
- Ability to delete images from Flickr if they have been removed from the local folder.
- Multiple users.
- Proxy support.
- Logging.
Cons:
- Cannot resize images.
- Does not show monthly MB limits.
- No batch image operations.
- No tag support.
FlickrMetadataSynchr
The developer claims that this tool that you to synchronize your metadata to images stored on Flickr using the original images stored locally. If there is no original on your hard drive, the tool can download the missing pictures for you. The tool can synchronize the metadata 2-way on a picture-by-picture and a metadata field-by-field basis. This tool sounds promising, but it didn’t seem to be functioning. If I can get it working I will update this section.
Conclusion
At the beginning of writing this I was leaning towards FlickrSync as being a “one-stop” tool, but after writing this blog I quickly saw some of the holes in the application. Its feature set lacks a few of the very basic editing functions such as tags or image resizing, but it does synchronize far better than the other tools. I will be using FlickrSync to synchronize and manage my images between Flickr and my local folders and most likely look for another tool to handle the few other editing issues that FlickrSync forgot about.
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