Auto Upload Images To Flickr With Uploader.py
Flickr is a great service for storing and sharing you photos on the web, but uploading images is often a hit or miss proposition. There’s always the default uploader provided by Flickr, but it’s a bit cumbersome for large sets of photos.
I’ve been relying on Kula’s 1001 to upload photos for some time, but unfortunately the program is notoriously unstable on Intel Macs. Michael looked at Fotofox as an alternative, but while Fotofox is nice and full-featured, it somehow never grabbed me.
Being a bit of python fan I was excited to find uploader.py, a Flickr uploading solution that works by watching a folder on your hard drive and, with a little help from good old cron, can automatically upload new photos whenever it discovers them.
Uploader.py is the brainchild of Cameron Mallory and the clever folks over at Lifehacker have written a great tutorial on how to set things up on both Windows and Mac OS X.
As with any outside program accessing Flickr, the first time you run uploader.py you’ll need to login to your Flickr account and authorize the script to work with your account.
Uploader.py has one dependency, it needs to use the XMLTramp.py file to parse XML. You can grab XMLTramp here and just add it to your python path (or alternately just stick it in the folder with uploader.py).
Other than that you just need to change a couple lines in the uploader.py script to point to the directory you want it to watch. From there you can either run it by hand in the terminal or add it to a cron job.
For the less programmatically inclined the uploader.py page says there is a GUI version available, though I haven’t tested it.
