Planet Geek!: Flickr Command Line Uploading - sort of!

So the ongoing project right now is to upload all 4000-some odd photos that I have stored on various machines up to my Flickr account. The sheer volume of images is quite staggering, as each uploaded pic has to be put into the appropriate set and tagged. Some of the uploading tools have been somewhat handy, but since the vast majority of my pics are stored remotely on a linux box, GUI tools aren't much help.

There's really no decent 'command line tool' for batch uploading pictures, but I think I've found a fairly decent way using Flickr's upload by email function.

Using a simple hand-entered script and Mutt's powerful command line functions, a directory full of images can simply be emailed to flickr, tags, text, titles and all.

Here's a sample run uploading a single directory. The tags can be set in the Subject line of the mail, or via the email page on Flickr. You pre-set the tags, then submit the images:

dbs@boomer:~/pictures/maine-may9-1998$ for i in *.jpg
> do
>   mutt -a $i -s $i yourprivateemail@photos.flickr.com < `pwd`
>   echo $i done.
> done
dave-1.jpg done.
dave-n-michael.jpg done.
don-finishes-up.jpg done.
final-dock-assembly.jpg done.
house-1.jpg done.
lake-1.jpg done.
lake-2.jpg done.
ready-to-unload.jpg done.
scott-steel.jpg done.

Simple, eh? Then I go to Flickr's 'organize' function, toss the new images into a set, and then I'm ready for the next batch. The images show up on Flickr in a matter of seconds, so I can do any size directory, from submission into a set, in about 2 minutes. The script is entered on the command line, so to upload the next directory, I reset the tags on flickr, cd to the new dir, and just up-arrow to the script, and hit enter. Boom!

Of course I have something like 400 directories to work through, but if I do a dozen or so a night, I'll get through them eventually.

---

Cloned from: Planet Geek!
Category: Geekitude
Full article & comments: Link (Comment ticker: )