Flickr Mass Uploader

I wrote this small utility to take advantage of the 1TB of storage offered FREE by Flickr.
This offer is great and it makes for an convenient way to keep a backup of your photo collection safe and accessible in the same time. But there was no application (at least not at the time I wrote this) that satisfactory ships a big collection of photos to Flickr automatically.

Flickr Mass Uploader does exactly that. It lacks the sophistication of other similar tools but it is more robust and does not crash (at least on the test machine!) at all. Biggest upload I tried it was over 20GB in size and it took more than two days to complete but it worked without any intervention.

The application first asks to authenticate, which is a two step process that assures that your credentials are never transferred to the program. You only provide a token to the program that it uses to authenticate with Flickr. The token is lost and authentication needs to be made again if any change is made to the program (even if you move it to another location). The program does not requests delete privileges on Flickr nor it requires write permission in the directory from where it uploads the pictures. This is to ensure that no information is lost even in unforeseen scenarios.

The program can only handle one extension at a time. So if you have multiple extensions for your pictures you have to run it for every extension to upload all your pictures.

The program will upload the pictures in new directories in sets that it creates (with the same name as the folders). For the folders that a set with the same name already exists, new pictures will be uploaded to that set.

There is also a sort button which sorts the content on Flickr: the sets are sorted alphabetically and photos are sorted inside a set.


The support for multiple directories can be added using collections. This is on the to-do list for a future release if this application will generate enough interest.