Photo processing / Flickr toolchain for Mac?

February 28, 2011 3:36 PM

I have a bunch of photos I haven't uploaded to Flickr. Why? Because it's a pain with the tools I have now. I want to be able to color-correct, title, caption, tag, and upload photos from my Mac as fast as possible.

I'm looking for one to three apps/scripts that I can use to:

• Color-correct (like Photoshop's "Auto Levels" command) photos a whole directory at a time--if it could do multiple directories at once, that'd be gravy, but it's not a high priority
• Assign sets, groups, titles, captions, and tags if desired, and
• Reliably upload them to Flickr.

Everything I've used for this has been wanting. iPhoto doesn't let you color-correct multiple pictures at once and ate some of my titles between the time I wrote them and the time I uploaded them, 1001 sometimes crashes in the middle of a long upload (with unpredictable results) and can't do color-correction anyway, and all the Gimp scripts I've seen for this have been inefficient, omitted the Flickr part, or both. I'm also not crazy about 1001's practice of putting all your tags into a giant list, and I haven't had very good luck with the Flickr Uploadr.

I'm on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard (10.6.6). My total budget is $0.00, although I could be persuaded to go up to $10 or so for a really good solution.

posted by tellumo to computers & internet (7 answers total)

Lightroom's good. A pain to set up if you already have libraries, though, as it wants to set up its own logs and library proxies and library duplicates blah blah blah (like iTunes). If you're patient it will work fine. It can batch process using it's best-guess for auto-color-auto-redeye-auto-levels. I doubt it can do auto-white-balance but I haven't played with it since v.2 so it might. I know the new version has built-in flickr upload ability, though!

On preview: It's $300. Maybe the free trial will live long enough for you?
posted by Khazk at 3:45 PM on February 28, 2011

I use Lightroom, but if you don't plan on being too anal the free Picasa tools are a great one-and-done utility.
posted by GilloD at 4:05 PM on February 28, 2011

GilloD, I'm seeing a few different ways to get photos from Picasa to Flickr--is there one you recommend? Or one anyone else recommends?

Lightroom looks great, but it is way out of budget.
posted by tellumo at 4:18 PM on February 28, 2011

Aperture can do this with lift and stamp and has built-in Flickr uploading.. It's $199, has a 30-day trial.
posted by katybird at 5:22 PM on February 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yah I know, not the $0 solution, but word on the curb is that Aperture 3 is only $79 via the App Store. source
posted by wemayfreeze at 5:32 PM on February 28, 2011

Aperture can do this with lift and stamp and has built-in Flickr uploading.. It's $199, has a 30-day trial.

Apreture is only $80 if you buy it in the Mac App Store.
posted by birdherder at 6:39 PM on February 28, 2011

Snow Leopard's built-in Automator tool in your Applications folder might handle your mass color correction needs. Create a workflow and play with the Add Effects to Images or Enhance Images actions. As for the metadata-setting mass upload, how's your Python?
posted by Monsieur Caution at 10:24 PM on February 28, 2011