Flickrfs - because the Flickr Uploader sux
I can recall a conversation with psd from early this year about why I think current way of uploading photos to flickr sux big time. I treat flickr as repository and backup of _all_ my photos (12525 photos at the moment, still growing) and not just as a photo blog. It means that very often I have to upload quite a lot of them in batches. The existing solutions just make me angry (how shabby is the standard Flickr Uploadr!) when I have to tag them and correctly name or create sets. I am not (yet) a mac user. Maybe there is something more user friendly, I hope.
So… Coming back to the conversation with psd I have told him that unless there is some clever integration with OS which will make the process of uploading more smooth it will be always the pain. I expected as well a bit more metadata to be populated by camera automatically. How cool would be to have GPS and geo-tag all the photos when taking them. That’s not the end. I would expect as well to be able to define some tags in a camera.
That would solve a bit problem with tags. The other problems are setting permissions, creating sets etc. For pretty long time I couldn’t find any tool which I liked. Lately after migrating all my home computers to Gutsy I found something called Flickrfs as an available package. It is a virtual filesystem which mounts a flickr account as any other data file storage. It synchronizes the flickr account with local filesystem and shows photos as images files with all metadata represented as text files.
Imagine that. You can upload photos to flickr just by using cp command, the same applies to downloading photos (even if Flickr itself makes it as hard as possible to get back of your own photos). Deleting is as easy as invoking rm. You can set permissions using standard chmod command and define sets by creating symlinks with ln.
I like the idea itself very much. The Flickrfs is created and maintained mainly by one person so there might be some small “bugletes” but I still support this project and wish it the best. Well done Manish Rai Jain!
Popularity: 28% [?]
