Download Squad

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (part 1 looked at jUploadr, & part 2 touched on Digikam). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Our software for today is the quickly-increasing-in-popularity F-Spot. Of course, it's also a bit controversial, seeing as it's built with Mono, but we can ignore that today. I wrote a column for Linux Magazine about F-Spot a while ago, while it was still pretty immature, but it's gotten better. If you use GNOME, then you're probably using F-Spot; if you use KDE, you're probably using Digikam, which we covered yesterday, as both programs are the premier photo management apps for their respective desktop environments (each will run, however, in the other's desktop environment, so you can use F-Spot on KDE, for instance).

Once F-Spot is open, select the pix you want to publish to the Web, and then go to File > Export > Export to Flickr.

As with the other proggies, you have to authorize the app with Flickr. Beyond that, you can set permissions for viewing, resize the images, remove metadata (though why you'd want to do that is beyond me), and - finally! - export your tags from F-Spot to Flickr. This is great, because tagging is key to Flickr's awesomeness, and F-Spot's ability to manage tags is MUCH MUCH MUCH improved from where it used to be, to the point that it's actually pretty easy to tag pix in F-Spot. Just make sure that the tags you're using in F-Spot are in fact the tags you want to use on Flickr!

F-Spot is another photo management tool, so it may be overkill for those interested in a simple, does-one-thing-only tool to upload pix to Flickr. But it's a very good photo management tool - in many ways better than Digikam - so it might be a better choice for many folks.

Tune in tomorrow for our last app!

This is part 2 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (see part 1, which covered jUploadr). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Today let's take a look at Digikam, a popular KDE photo management tool that also uploads your pix to Flickr. I'm not gonna cover Digikam itself, as there are plenty of reviews of that program available on the InterWeb; instead, I'm just going to focus on Digikam's ability to interact with Flickr.

Open up Digikam, and then go to Album > Export to Flickr.

(The first time you try to Export to Flickr, you have to authorize with Flickr, just like all the other apps we're looking at here. Do that & then come back here.) Immediately after selecting Export, you're presented with the Flickr Export window, which gives you a couple of options for the photos you've selected.

First of all, press the Add Photos button & then select the images you want to upload. You can add tags to the pix you're uploading, & set the privacy options, & resize the pix to a maximum dimension. That's about it. Make yer choices, & then press OK. Your pictures start to upload, & you're finished.

If you use Digikam anyway, this is a good way to upload your pix to Flickr. If you don't use Digikam, I wouldn't start using it just to get images into Flickr, as it's too heavy of an app for a small purpose. There's overhead to Digikam that ain't worth it if all you want is a Flickr tool.

Tune in tomorrow for our next app!

This is part 1 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box. I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro. Our first app up to the plate is jUploadr.

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Let's be honest here: BSD is incredibly powerful, stable, and secure, but it's never been the first OS that enters folks' minds when you utter the word "desktop." There are some new ideas in the BSD world, however, and the people behind those new ideas are trying hard to expand BSD to more desktops. At LinuxWorld, the evidence for that is PC-BSD, a version of BSD designed to be easy to install and use. Utilizing a graphical installer based on the slick QT (the same toolkit used by the KDE desktop environment), this is about the most desktop-friendly release of BSD I've ever seen. Even the software installer is easy to use; in fact, it's quite Windows-like. Simply click on the app you want to install and a wizard opens up that looks 'n feels exactly like the typical Windows installer we've all used a gazillion times. Heck, there's even an uninstaller that's just as easy! What the heck is happening to BSD? Have aliens taken over the bodies of BSD developers? An easy-to-use desktop BSD? What will they think of next?

(I gotta tell you guys this one, though: there's still signs of the good ol' BSD attitude at LinuxWorld. When I asked a very knowledgeable and cool dude at the FreeBSD booth about these new efforts to get more folks using BSD, he jokingly said, "Actually, we don't give a f*** if you run BSD, we just want to make the best server OS out there." He quickly followed that up by saying that the new FreeBSD marketing team, about one year old, in fact does care quite a bit about users. But it's good to see signs of the old Unix 'tude still present and accounted for.)