How to upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr
January 28, 2009 by Ross McKillop
This tutorial will guide you through installing FFXporter, a small iPhoto plugin that allows you to upload photos from iPhoto directly to Flickr.
Note: this tutorial applies to iPhoto ‘08 (and possibly earlier). iPhoto ‘09 has this functionality built in.
- First things first, download the latest version of FFXporter. Open the .dmg file, and run the installation program found inside. The installation process is painfully straight forward, you’ll click Continue a bunch of times, enter your password at one point, and then you’re done. If iPhoto was open while you installed FFXporter, close and re-launch it.
- In iPhoto, select some files that you want to upload to Flickr.
- Now select File -> Export…
- You should see a FFXporter tab at the top of the Export window. Select it. The first thing you’ll want to do is sign in to Flickr, so click the Login button in the top left corner.
- iPhoto will ask you to open a browser. Click the Open Browser button.
- You’ll be taken to Flickr, and assuming you’re signed in, you’ll be prompted to “allow” Free Flickr eXporter for iPhoto to link to your Flickr account. Click the OK, I’LL ALLOW IT button.
- A confirmation window will be displayed. You can close the window (or browser) now.
- Back on the FFXporter tab of iPhoto, click the Continue button in the upper-left corner.
- Now iPhoto by way of FFXporter will allow you to upload photos, set their permissions, content type, and add photos to sets (as well as creating new sets).
- If you’d like to add them to a set, click the Add Photoset… button, give it a name, and click the Add set button.
- Click the Export button to upload the photos you selected back in step #2. They’ll be uploaded to Flickr and added to the set you specified.
- That’s it! You won’t need to repeat the entire process each time you upload photos to Flickr via iPhoto, it’s much shorter the 2nd time (and subsequent times).
Let it be known that this is for iPhoto 08 or before. In iPhoto 09, the option to upload to facebook and flickr are built-in.
Iphoto ‘09 may have this fucntionality “built-in” but it’s seriously broken and not as flexible as FFXporter, I have discovered to my great disappointment.
In iPhoto 09:
# Uploading photos in bulk does not preserve the order (any order) in the Flickr stream. So your photostream gets whack out of order.
# When you upload photos it assumes that whatever event, album, or smart album you’re currently viewing the photos in should be created as a Set on Flickr. Oh and if the event, album or smart album contains any ’special’ character that Flickr won’t like in a set name, it won’t do the upload and doesn’t tell you why not.
# Deleting the spuriously created Flickr Album in iPhoto means the photos are removed from Flickr. After iPhoto tells you it won’t actually delete any photos! (it means from iPhoto, not Flickr).
Agree with Scot, the ‘09 functionality is seriously broken.
In addition to the problems he points out a very serious one is that if the transfer somehow gets interrupted, particularly after it is done uploading the “thumbnails” but not the full rez ones, it doesn’t pick up again, and there is no way to get it restarted. The only way is to delete the pics in Flickr and start again.
Also, it spontaneously “drops” pictures from the synched folders, and again, nothing that can be done about it.
It’s a shame Apple would put out such a seriously flawed piece of software.a