Recently, Flickr released a new version of their own uploading-tool, Flickr Uploadr. The new version has some nice new features, like reordering the photos and working offline.

Flickr Uploadr is surprisingly good tool, as it is dead easy to chain it with Adobe Lightroom’s Export actions. On Mac, you only need to make a shortcut of Uplodr to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Export Actions and you can it as Post-processor in your Export presets. Of course, you can use it in your Automator scripts in similar way, too. Other major benefit is that it is dead simple. The only downside is that I’ve not figured out how to pass titles and descriptions to Uploadr (like from iPhoto to FlickrExport).

I was interested in the reordering feature, so I downloaded the new version for my PowerBook G4 (some might guess how this worked out). The new version has a completely new interface, which seems to be HTML-based since the tool is based on Mozilla’s XUL Runtime. This means that the simple uploading tool is now 40 MB when installed. I guess one reason for this is that the tool is crossplatform and therefore should be less resource-intensive to develop. Anyway, the previous version of the tool, 2.3 (Mac) is around 1 megabyte in size. Okay, hard drives are quite large these days so that doesn’t matter that much, but it makes you wonder if someone just felt the need to rewrite the whole thing for the sake of making it more “web 2.0”.

Much worse than the size, the simplicity was gone. The simple upload(e)r now looks like a full-fledged application – for rather simple operation. Why all this bloat? I don’t want to manage this files anymore, I did that already in Lightroom, now I only want to move this files to Flickr. The Uploardr 3 has been over-engineered and is a bloated piece of programming compared to Uploadr 2. Other than being cross-platform, I fail to see the benefits of making a simple uploading tool on JavaScript and XUL. Especially when it is full of bugs.

The all new version for Windows and Mac OS X makes it easy to add titles, tags and descriptions to photos, add them to sets and adjust each photo’s privacy settings.

But what was the most worrying thing was that it would not work. Yes, I could do all the above, but the photo’s themselves didn’t appear. It became later apparent that All PowerPC-based Macs had this issue. Instead of the photos, we just got Flickr’s two spinning balls.

A week later, Flickr released an update, which supposedly fixes this problem – among others. For some people, the “Upload”-button wasn’t showing up. Then again, in the above quote they don’t mention uploading as a feature…

What I need is a tool for uploading photos to Flickr after I’ve played with them in Lightroom, I do not need any further playing around. Uploadr 2 does this rather nicely, Uploadr 3 not.

This makes me wonder if this is the future that Silverlight and AIR will be bringing too -  Javascript problems for desktop apps.

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