Moving to Ubuntu continues (See Previous article).
Continuing my quest to move everything i am doing to Linux, an important step is uploading photos to Flickr - the photo management website. Its not like its a horribly complicated. As a matter of fact, its downright simple. Well, atleast in Windows, it is.
So, I fire up my trusty Firefox and navigate to Flickr.com. The Flickr tools section points you to jUploadr - a java based equivalent of the Windows-based Uploader utility. Hold on a minute! Did i just read Java-based .. ugh! Having been a Java programmer myself, i have learnt to appreciate the importance of native applications. The jUploadr comes very close to acting its Windows counterpart - but just close. It lacks features like uploading to a new album - something i always do. It also doesnt prompt me for tags when i upload. Instead it expects me to go into preferences and set them. Not very intuitive, scohen.
And yes, before i forget. It needs Sun Java runtime to be installed (that can be done with a: sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre). In short, this (too) is isnt something a non-techie user can do on his/her own. And if you are unfortunate to have GCJ (GNU Compiler for Java) installed, then this can get a bit complicated since you need to uninstall gcj first. I would have expected apt-get to do the job (sudo apt-get remove gcj). But nope! I still have no reason why that did not work. So finally fired up synaptic and uninstalled gcj from there. After that jUploader had no problems.
To make a long story short, Flickr-ing on Ubuntu is no where as smooth as in Windows. So, score plus one to Windows. As for me, i switched to a different machine (the one that was running Windows) and used my trusty Flickr uploader from there.
See also: See you later Linux and other UNIX/Linux articles
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10 comments:
You should try right clicking or double clicking on a photo when it's in the UI.
You can add photos to sets *and* set tags on a per-photo basis. You can also select more than one photo at a time and edit properties on all of them. Much more intuitive than flickr's uploader.
I made this software especially *because* the flickr uploadr wasn't available on linux, and was horribly unintuitive. I certainly didn't make it an equivalent, it's much more powerful. I'd also wager that users are used to clicking on photos, don't you?
I use windows, I do not sue flickr uploadr, but rather juploader because it actually finishes uploading... not to mention it has a ton more features.
scohen, thanks for taking the time to respond :)
if you have kde you can use kflickr. this was the best choice for me.
Why not use F-Spot photo manager to organise your images and upload them to either Flickr or Picasa albums? Works like a charm.
Yes, that is certainly an option now. It wasnt when I wrote this review. That's also saying I need to update this ;-)
f-spot that came with ubuntu 7.10 works pretty well for export to Flickr
I too tried uploading in Ubuntu 8.04 via Flickr Uploader thats available in Ubuntu repository, kflickr and juploadr - none of them has all the option and ease of uploading via the Windows version that comes with flickr.com.
A new version is released that can upload videos as well :
http://h.yimg.com/ce/flickr/FlickrUploadr-3.1.0-en.exe
Source: http://www.labnol.org/software/download/-/3068/
To be honest, I havent used jUploader a lot after having written this post. But from what I see today, it has come a long way from when i reviewed it.
In the meanwhile, Flickr has significantly improved it's uploading feature by introducing the Flash-based uploader page. That's what I use most of the times. But yes, the Flickt Uploadr tool for windows has been my primary tool for uploading whenever I have more than 20-25 photos to upload.
jUploadr, I feel, brings a an ever increasing set of those features to platforms where the Windows version cannot be run - Eg. Linux.
My rule of thumb about java apps is - use platform independent only when native options have been ruled out!
I didn't like jUploadr, and my kFlickr sucked (I couldn't get it to authorise, I guess it wanted to open a website, but he launched it in my calender program...).
After using windows for a time, today I found out you can just use wine to run it. Too bad the drag 'n drop doesn't work there...
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