Flickr, Python, Google, Open Source, and More!

I’ve spent a lot of time lately experimenting with different workflows for “prosumer” photo management. Since I last wrote on the topic, I’ve bought into Flickr, buying a one year “Pro” membership. This entitles me to unlimited storage, so I want to upload my entire 60+ gigabytes of photos. However, almost immediately I’ve run into problems. Neither the Flick Uploader or the freeware FlickrSync work properly. The latter continues to produce duplicates on the Flickr server for me.

Another problem I’ve had to conquer is how to share my photos once they are at Flickr. I’d rather have them integrated with my personal site than send visitors to Flickr. For $25 a year, I feel I have the right to distribute my own photos. The Flickr license supports this, as long as there is a link to the original on Flickr.

To solve these problem and as part of my Sisyphean task to create the ideal and effortless, yet easy, way to share photos, I’ve dusted off my programming fingers and started banging out some code. I’ve got two efforts working:

1.) I’m trying to contribute to the Drupal Flickr Module. Drupal is an open source CMS that I use to publish my personal site. I’ve tweaked their Flickr module to easily publish individual or photo sets from Flickr to my site. I’ve offered my code to that team, so I hope it’s soon easy for all Drupal users to do the same. A WordPress module would also be easy to create.

2.) I just started a project at http://code.google.com called FlickrOCD. Currently, I’m only at the “Hello World” phase with Python, but I had switched a New Year’s resolution to learn Spanish to learn a new computer language instead. That should free up some time.

Whether or not I can complete these projects, I’m enjoying learning more about the Drupal CMS ,the Google App Engine, MVC, and GQL. It helps me manage developer teams when I am familiar with multiple technologies so that I can steer the team to the architecture most appropriate for our goals.

Someday, when a friend or relative asks, “How should I manage my photos?” I hope to send them to a complete guide here at STC.com.

February 7, 2009 · Filed under Digital Photography, Internet Companies, Online Life

2 Comments »

  1. Pedro Geada Said,

    February 25, 2009 @ 7:00 pm

    I find it very strange that you still find FlickrSync creating duplicates. We have thousands of users and I believe these problems do not exist anymore (on previous versions there were problems with large sets due to some API limitations).
    I would like to invite you to send an email to FlickrSync support (flickrsync@gmail.com) with some detail on the problem so that we try to solve the issue for you.

    Thanks

  2. Sean Said,

    February 25, 2009 @ 8:45 pm

    I discovered the part of the error was me. FlickrSync matches photos with the target Flickr Set. I have hundreds of folders, each a particular date (ie 2009_02_25). FlickrSync was creating a new set for each folder. I was then deleting the set, resyncing, and getting duplicates. To fix this, I created a set called “all” that I sync all my folders to. It’s working, but slowly. I have many gigs of photos.

    I will install the latest version of FlickrSync and keep using it. I’ll log issues at you site to help. FlickrSync is the best tool I’ve found for getting an existing, large photo collection on to Flickr.

    Thank you for your comment and thank you for building FlickrSync!

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