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