I’m scanning old photos into the computer. Tons and tons of photos. This is not without problems. I have reams of photos to upload. One of the green photo books is almost scanned in. The biggest problem at this stage is organization. All the photos get name OldPhotoXXX.tif. Then I make a folder and drop them in. The folders look good on my computer, but Flickr is flat. Only the name matters. I can upload each folder, tagging the contents with the folder name. That would take forever. There are probably 60+ folders. For example, Kid Pictures contains one folder per kid or grandkid and then one folder for the brother/sister group shots. I picked the arrangement to make finding a particular person for the slide show very easy. It makes a lot of folders.
How am I going to get these up to Flickr? It’s worth paying for at this point.
Arghhh.. Flickr’s not a help. They want you to use their site exclusive. F that. My copy will carry the same info. Flickr will not live forever and I’m not spending months rescanning and renaming.
Ok, I got part of the problem solved. It took an hour and a half to write a Visual Basic script that renames the files to the folder name plus an increment. It’s extremely fast. About 2 seconds for 303 files in 76 folders. The script is here. It’s very small, 4kb. Now the problem is how to upload 76 folders. If each took 30 seconds it would take 38 minutes. So, probably an hour. Wouldn’t it be great to hit a button and it would tag and upload them for me. Maybe the Windows Home Server Flickr Plugin will do it for me. It’s sweet being able to write a script to do this. Many thousands of hours have gone into training this skill and I very seldom get to use it at home.
Ok, so I was checking out the very thin documentation on the .Net Flickr API. It looks very easy to upload.
But I had a great idea. I’ve been concerned about people marking up the unknown pictures with tags as they identify the people. How do I copy that back to the Windows file system master copy? And there is sometimes written info on the back of the photo that can’t go in Flickr, because I mass upload them. I think I can use this API to do it. This will sync the extra tag content on Flickr with Windows, notify me of recent changes and comments made to specific photos, and update the file location + name to match Flickr.
There has been another concern. I drop these photos in a new empty set of folders every time. So, that I don’t re-upload photos. This app can look check for file existence on Flickr before uploading. I can use one folder for scanning and not have to merge two sets of them. I’m wondering why Flickr Uploadr doesn’t do this already.
If I do this little app, when I’m done, the code will be available under Creative Commons or some other lic. Hopefully, others will find it useful. He he, I’m so aries.