Declan’s Blog

Short version - Flickr has removed their 2G/month upload restriction.  You can use an extension called FireUploader to upload thousands of files to Flickr.

Long version -

I like to take pictures.  Lots of pictures.  My favorite feature of the Canon Rebel XT is the “b’juuu b’juuu” setting.  That’s the one that goes “b’juuu b’juuu” when you hold down the button, taking up to 9 pictures at once.  Sweet.

Last year, I took about 5500 pictures, all of them 8 megapixel.  That’s about 16G of pixel abuse.  Add to that the 4G of stuff I had from older cameras, and we’re up past 20G.

Last year, I also bought a Flickr Pro account.  Unlimited storage!  But there was a catch…  A 2G upload limit per month.  So, to get all my stuff backed up on Flickr, I need to split all my pictures into 10 groups of 2G each, and commit to keeping track of what I’ve done each month.  Bleh.

So, I avoided the problem, took more pictures, and felt bad every time a month went by and I’d wasted my 2G quota.  Something had to be done.

I knew Flickr had an API, and I knew that I could break the problem down to a simple queue processing problem.  All I needed to do was relearn how to program, something that would probably take another 10 months. 

So I did what I usually do in this situation.  I Google until I find someone else with my same problem.  And just like browsing the shelves of a library, I found something even better!  Flickr had lifted the 2G/month limit!  W00t!

Well, maybe no so W00t…  After many experiments with diminishing sized batches of photos, I learned that the Flickr Uploadr is not a solid piece of software, at least for more than 100 pictures at once.  Even then, it would fail once in a while, leaving a mess of pictures that never made it into a set.  With 100 pictures at once, I’d have to do this more than 50 times, checking each upload a picture at a time.  Very tedious. 

If only there were an upload tool that could hook to my Flickr account, let me point at thousands of local files, and upload them one at a time unattended - kind of like a smart FTP client.

Another methodology I use to solve these kinds of problems is to whine to all of my friends until they get so sick of hearing about it that they think of something.  My buddy Tad mentioned that he was able to use Amazon’s S3 file storage service to save significant costs on some popular files on his company’s web site.  I asked, “How did you get the files onto S3?”  “I found a Firefox extension that just let me drag and drop.”  Neato, I thought.

Although I didn’t apply Tad’s situation to my Flickr problem, another buddy, Robert, found the S3 extension and IM’d me that the same author had written a Firefox transfer extension for Flickr!

The extension is called FireUploader and it solved all my problems!  It is written by rjonna@rjonna.com.  All I had to do was install the extension, dump all of my thousands of photos onto a machine, fire up the tool in Firefox, select all of my photos, select the set I wanted them to live in, then walk away.  Three days later, and I’ve got gigs and gigs of photos all backed up.

There’s a nice Progress Bar area so I can find any files that failed and reload them.  Actually, once I diagnosed a latency issue with my external drive, and subsequently moved all the files to the local drive, I had no errors with thousands of files.

I love the intarweb!

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