So a couple of days ago I started the arduous task of uploading my archived mobile device photos to Flickr (user name intafon). I have uploaded a large number of photos now and have ended up trading off uploading tools do to some trouble I was having with one of them. The Flickr sponsored upload tool began after some time to experience some XML parsing error and would no longer insert the photos I was uploading into the set to which I wanted to upload them, so I switched over to the other sponsored tool entitled “1001”, which has some advantages over the Flickr upload tool anyway, such as being able to select multiple images in your upload queue for selective tagging. Its big downfall for me is the inability to parse tags with quotes, so if you tag something “german shepherd” it tags them as “german” and “shepherd” — a flaw that is not a problem in the Flickr Upload Tool.
All in all, Flickr has come a long way – to the point that I will actually use it now, and the tools around it have become pretty useable. The site itself, however, still needs some usability treatment. I do wish that the ability to change “taken on” dates was included in the batch processing, although I will concede that the percentage of people uploading from many different dates in the past is probably pretty slim, and the ability to read EXIF tags from jpegs is pretty great.
The problem, however, with EXIF tags (in my case especially) is that many devices that take photos (palm pilot and my samsung phone for example) do not include properly formatted EXIF data in the captured photos. Fortunately, most of my archived photos were named in such a way that the date taken is embedded into the file name of the photo, so I was able to build a little applescript application for OSX that uses the perl Image::ExifTool module to batch insert the proper EXIF data into my photos based on their filenames. (I also have the device indicated in the filename, so I was able to insert the camera device into the EXIF data as well, which also shows up on Flickr). Now, all my photos can be ordered by date taken, which makes more sense as they span from back in 2003.
,,, more later…