Seeking advice on flickr maintenance and interface.

July 21, 2011 7:01 PM

Seeking advice on good tools for automating the maintenance of a professional flickr site, and ways to make an interface to it.

I am in the process of making thousands of professional-quality photos available through flickr, along with some friends. We love the idea of using flickr to host our images because of the size of its user base, and we do not want to fully reinvent the wheel for sharing photos. We have already uploaded and tagged half of our images.

Now I am wondering if there are any good programs to automate the maintenance of our flickr site. I would be especially interested in programs that allow us to do things like change all of the descriptions of photos in a set at the same time, or add all of the photos tagged in a certain way to a set.

Also, are there any ways to use flickr as a back-end for a photo database, such that we could use our own non-flickr website as an interface to our images on flickr? Unfortunately our web-development skills are limited, so we would only be willing to try easy-to-implement solutions.

Thanks in advance for any advice that you can provide.

posted by mortaddams to computers & internet (4 answers total)

flickr already has an interface to add tags to entire sets under "organizer." they do not have a function that does this for titles or descriptions, probably because it would be unusual to want to set the titles and descriptions of a set of photos all to the exact same thing.

I used to use a flash based flickr front-end but it's no-longer supported and wasn't that great anyway.
a quick google for flickr front end came up with this ask mefi
posted by j03 at 11:53 PM on July 21, 2011

Sorry, that ask mefi is pretty old and full of dead links.

Found this wordpress plugin though.
posted by j03 at 11:57 PM on July 21, 2011

Another thought, that may or may not work is using Adobe Lightroom as your master database and having it update flickr. Here's a post on importing from flickr to lightroom. But lightroom can do all the maintenance things you want. If you select a set and add tags or descriptions to a group of photos, lighroom can sync those changes with flickr.
posted by j03 at 12:03 AM on July 22, 2011

Check the Flickr App Garden for some options on editing / adding to descriptions in bulk.

Using Flickr as a hosting provider is forbidden in their TOS, so better watch out for that.
posted by pkingdesign at 12:17 AM on July 23, 2011