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Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr
Ever since Lightroom 1.3 was released with support for export plugins, I've been looking forward to being able to export directly to Flickr from inside Lightroom. Today, while searching around on the net, I found that fellow O'Reilly author Jeffrey Friedl has recently released his Lightroom Export Plugin for Flickr. Of course, I grabbed it immediately to take it for a spin. So far, I'm liking what I see.
Like any other Lightroom export plugin, the interface shows up in the Export dialog box. In a very nice touch, Jeffrey's plugin gives quite a few options for mapping the metadata from your photos to Flickr's title and description fields, allowing you to adapt the plugin to your own metadata captioning standards. Here's what the user interface looks like:
After punching the Export button, the plugin goes into the background and uploads photos, just like it should. And, in a very nice touch (and unlike Flickr's own FlickrUploadr), the plugin is able to pass on accented and other non-US ASCII characters to Flickr without a problem. This small but important touch will be a real time saver for me as it seems that I'm always having to correct characters after upload using FlickrUploadr.
Caveat reader: I've only just started kicking the tires on this plugin. I haven't yet really stressed it by throwing dozens of images at it at once and I haven't explored all the nooks and crannies. But, it's passed the 5 minute quick test with flying colors and I'm looking forward to using it more.
Comments (2)
Sigh...if only there were an equivalent tool to extract my metadata from Flickr and apply it to my Lightroom catalogs.
I know there's no shared key to map the Flickr internal unique ID to anything local, but damn would it be nice to be able to recapture some of the hundreds of thousands of tags, ratings, etc., that have been added to my images on Flickr.
I'm still dragging my feet about going back through my 50,000 or so images from the last couple of years and adding appropriate rating, keyword, and title metadata, but I know that it will only get harder the longer I wait.
And just as important to me is that he also has a nearly identical plugin for uploading to Zenfolio. Works a treat as well.