Managing photos on Flickr.com with KFlickr

Photo Copier

By Frank Wieduwilt

www.photocase.com

Kflickr [1] is a tool that helps you upload photos to Yahoo's Flickr [2] online service (see the "Flickr" box). You can describe and edit your images on your local machine, rather than using the typically lethargic Flickr web interface. The software is currently at version 0.5, with the critical functions for uploading files already in place. To use Kflickr to upload photos onto the World Wide Web, you first need to register with the Flickr service.

Figure 1: The Flickr service is an easy way to publish your digital images.

Installation

A source code archive, DEB and RPM packages, and a Klik installer [4] for Kflickr are available from the Kflickr homepage. We had no trouble installing the Debian package on Kubuntu 5.10, and the RPM package installed on Mandriva Linux 2006 without any complaints.

If you prefer to build the program from the source code, start by giving the command tar -xjvf kflickr-0.5.tar.bz to untar the tarball, and then change to the new source code directory by entering cd kflickr-0.5. Once you get there, type ./configure to create the makefile, and then run make to launch the compiler and build the program.

The su -c "make install" command prompts you for the root password and copies the program and help files to the right position in the filesystem tree. Enter kflickr in a terminal window to launch the program.

Authenticate and Upload

Before you can start uploading photos, you need to set up your Flickr account to use KFlickr. To do so, press the Authenticate New User... button in the main window. This button tells the program to contact the Flickr homepage. After you enter your login data, Flickr asks you if you want to permit the Kflickr tool to access your data. After agreeing, go back to KFlickr and click Complete Authentication in the authentication dialog.

From now on, you will find your Flickr username in the User list in the KFlickr main window. The Photoset list groups any Sets you have already set up on Flickr, however, the program does not have a set creation feature at this time of writing, so you will still need to use the web interface for creating sets.

It is easy to add photos: press Add in the main Kflickr window, and select the image you want to upload in the file selection dialog. The dialog does not give you a preview of the selected file. However, you can drag images from other KDE applications such as Konqueror or Digikam, and drop them into the Kflickr window.

Name That Picture!

After compiling a group of images for uploading, you can edit the images before you start to upload. To do so, first select an image, and then press Edit. The dialog that appears is slightly confusing: it has no less than three buttons with an OK label (Figure 2). There is a thumbnail top left. The button with the magnifying glass opens a larger preview in a separate window. And the button with the plus sign below this lets you rotate the image in 90 degree increments.

Figure 2: Adding descriptions and tags to images

You can add an image title in the Title text box, and use the Upload Size box to specify the image size for Flickr. Kflickr scales your images before uploading but without touching the original image. The Tags list contains the image tags mentioned earlier. The list gives you the tags that Flickr defines by default; but you can type an entry, and click Add to add a new tag to the list; Flickr will then use the tag when you upload your images.

The options below Privacy Control let you restrict access to your Flickr images to your family and friends. Pressing the right OK button sends the image tags to the main window; pressing the left OK button sends the description to the main window, and clicking the OK button in the middle closes the dialog.

After assigning descriptions to your images, just press Upload in the Kflickr main window to start uploading. A progress indicator lets you keep track of the copying process. At the bottom left in the status bar, you can see the available upload bandwidth after completing the current upload.

Conclusions

Flickr is a service that lets you publish your digital photos on the Internet, and Kflickr is a handy interface to Flickr that lets you easily manage photos and upload images to your Flickr account.

This article should help you get started with configuring Kflickr. If you're looking for more information on managing your Flickr site with KDE's Kflickr, check out the comprehensive online manual, which you will find at the Kflickr website [1].