Best way to upload tens of thousands of photos to Flickr? 💻 ➡ 🌏

December 28, 2016 10:05 PM

I need a reliable, robust app (or way) to upload an enormous amount of photos from my Mac to my Flickr Pro account. Suggestions or ideas?

I have tens of thousands of photos that I want to move from the Photos app on my Mac to my Flickr Pro account.

The thing is, the online Flickr upload page seems to pretty consistently crap out if I try to upload more than a hundred or two at a time.

I know that Flickr has a new Flickr Uploader app that says it will automatically upload images placed in a certain folder, but the app has limitations.

• For one, you can't select which Flickr album the photos should go into (instead, it just creates a new album from the name of the folder on your Mac).
• Also, there's no way to add Flickr Tags, which is an incredibly useful way for finding the images later.

I know there are some third-party Flickr-uploading apps for the Mac out there, but the reviews I've seen speak of various issues, or of not working with El Capitan (not to mention Mac OS Sierra). I haven't seen an app that everyone seems to think is perfect—or even 4 out of 5 stars.

Does anyone out there have a Flickr-uploader for the Mac that they use that is robust (doesn't crash or hang, even on large uploads), and allows for specifying Flickr Albums and Tags?

(I feel like if I can't find anything, the best idea may be to use the Flickr-branded app, but then to just go in after each upload batch, select the hundreds of photos and then batch-assign the Albums and a big laundry list of Tags).

Anyone else run into the problem of uploading an enormous amount of images to Flickr from a Mac?
If so, how did you best solve it?

posted by blueberry to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

Not sure if you have seen this, but Picbackman or Zilla Upload [they are both similar] may help you.

This was posted as an answer here in one of the other threads, but I haven't used it so far.
posted by theobserver at 5:11 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

If it were me, I would probably use Exiftool to add the required identifying tag to each group/album of photos, and then the Organizer within Flickr to select and add matching photos to the albums I want.

If that's not your thing, look into Flickery.
posted by dmd at 6:52 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

The older Flickr Uploader where you could set up albums and tags will still work. It is not at ALL robust (it will sometimes crash and doesn't save state very well) but if you are just trying to bulk upload to a chunk of albums with a chunk of tags, it's not bad. Not sure where to track it down but I have a copy and would be happy to send it along to you.
posted by jessamyn at 8:12 AM on December 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think that it will be fastest for you to use the new uploading option and then go in and assign albums and tags as needed. yHow much have you used the Organize feature? It is decent though not as detailed as I would like. You can use it to find photos that are not tagged or not in an album. You can sort your search results by date taken or date uploaded and you can add tags and albums in bulk.
posted by soelo at 8:40 AM on December 29, 2016

I still upload things with iPhoto which works well. The new Photos app may have similar integration if that works for you.
posted by Cogito at 10:34 AM on December 29, 2016

I've been doing it from the new Photos app, and it works fine. I have not uploaded thousands, but definitely 100 or so at a time with no problem. It does allow tagging and some organization. (I used to use the old Flickr Uploader in the dark ages, and I still miss it)
posted by hydropsyche at 2:11 PM on December 29, 2016

It's also worth looking into whether this is even something you want to do. It's increasingly likely Flickr won't be around for more than another year or so.
posted by dmd at 7:48 AM on December 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

That has been the rumor for about 10 years now.
posted by soelo at 12:11 PM on December 30, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster:

It's increasingly likely Flickr won't be around for more than another year or so.

Yeah, I'd be happy to go Google Photos, but my dSLR takes 24.2 megapixel photos and the free version of Google Photos converts everything to a smaller image size.
And the equivalent paid-version of Google Photos is about six times the price of Flickr Pro ($10 a month versus $25 a year).
posted by blueberry at 8:45 PM on December 30, 2016

Response by poster: I was thinking that it would be incredibly helpful if the Mac Photos app could use the "faces" it found in my photos and fill them in automatically to the Tags field when I uploaded from Photos to Flickr, but that doesn't look like a feature... I wonder if there's some sort of Photos plug-in that does this...
posted by blueberry at 8:47 PM on December 30, 2016

Response by poster: For anyone still reading, I tried using the Flickr Uploader to upload a bunch of photos and found that it's strips out the titles of the images—so however many images you upload with it, they all have no name.

So, if you want to search later for DSC_0209.jpg or "Rebecca's First Steps - October 11th 2014.jpg" you're not going to find anything.

This is very disappointing.
posted by blueberry at 7:18 PM on January 6, 2017