Search for One-Click Adobe Photoshop Elements to Flickr Upload

With over 1.5 million users reported at the end of 2005 Flickr is easily one of the most popular photo sharing sites. As a Windows user I use Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 to manage my photo library. I chose PSE from a number of photo management suites such as (Google Picasa, Adobe PSE, ACDSee Photo Manager, photools IMatch) due to it's intuitive interface and integration with Yahoo! Maps (new in version 5.0). Naturally I wanted an easy way to upload my photos to Flickr while retaining my tags, descriptions and geocoding information.

This is where my search began for a one-click PSE to Flickr upload solution. The problem can be broken down into three major parts

1. Initiate upload of pictures from within PSE
2. Write tags, descriptions and geocoding information to pictures
3. Upload to Flickr

The first and second steps can largely be accomplished using the File->Export command in PSE which will export the selected files to a folder of the users choosing while at the same time writing tags, descriptions and geocoding information to IPTC headers and EXIF metadata of the pictures. Unfortunately there is a bug in PSE which writes the GPS information to the XMP data instead of the more common GPS section in EXIF (which is used by Flickr). To get around this we can use exiftool, an excellent command line tool for editing picture metadata. With some guidance from Phil Harvey, the author of exiftool, I was able to copy the GPS information from the XMP data section to the GPS EXIF section. On to step 3.

For uploading I'm using Flickr Uploadr version 2.3 provided by Flickr. I wrote a quick Visual Basic script which scans the directory I exported my pictures to from step 1, corrects for the GPS bug in PSE and then passes the photos via the command line to Flickr Uploadr to upload to my Flickr account. I then click the upload button and I'm done.

So what's missing? Right now my workflow consists of

1. Select photos in PSE and select File->Export
2. Run my VBS script to fix the GPS metadata bug and send the photos to Flickr Uploadr
3. Click upload and wait for the upload to finish
4. Delete photos from the export folder

Not exactly one-step but close. There are two tools that would bring the workflow down to a single step:

First, a program that monitors a folder for changes and then executes a script when a file is added. I've found two such solutions.

1. DirJack java tool on sourceforge
2. FlickrMonitr upload tool
   

I followed the instructions to run DirJack but I was confronted with errors. After fighting with DirJack for a while I gave up on it. As for FlickrMonitr it looked like exactly what I needed for the entire workflow (except for correcting the GPS bug). I emailed the author for a copy of the program and the source code if he was willing to share it. Alas, I never heard back from him.

Second, a windows command line tool to upload photos to Flickr which can initiate the upload from the command line and signal that the upload has been completed successfully. I have been unable to find such a tool.

Currently I'm left with my 4 step solution for uploading photos from Adobe Photoshop Elements to Flickr. Does anyone know of free windows tools which will solve my remaining two problems? I need a FREE tool to monitor a directory for changes and a command line Flickr uploader.

theTechShark is up and running

After a little perusing of the web for blogging software I decided to give Google's Blogger beta a try. There are a plethora of different blogging packages available. I chose Blogger mainly because it was free and I could get up and running very quickly. Normally I would host my own software for complete control but I'm on Netfirms right now and their servers are dirt slow so I'll let Google's server farms do their job.

After some quick template editing I've made a respectable looking blog. I'm going to continue tinkering but this will work for the time being. I'm going to post an article or two on my experience with Blogger beta hacks and the tricks that I've learned over the last couple of days. Stay tuned.