If you’re a Flickr user and not a Flickr Desktop Uploadr user, you should be. It is the hidden gem of the heavily trafficked site and best friend of frequent uploaders.

The Flickr Uploadr for desktop use have gone through changes over the years. It’s reached its current maturity at 3.2.1 after being plagued with upload crashes, double uploads and copy loss for images. This version doesn’t suffer likes its predecessors . . . well, not as much.

There still are occasional crashes but the Uploadr handles restarting better and will load up the last batch of photos for upload with their copy intact on restart. I’ve found this to be a more frequent issue if I am trying to upload photos to Flickr from a throttled internet connection with slow speeds. Cough, Time-Warner Road Runner, cough.

With that said, I’ve found the Uploadr the easiest way to get batch photos online with titles, descriptions, tags and grouped the way the I want them with privacy settings. Here’s a peek for the uninitiated:

With the ability to create groups like this and see them in left hand column I am able to more effectivley tell a story about each image as it relates to one another. To be honest, it is kind of fun to be able to create a narrative about a photo set that can be shared with viewers.

You’ll also notice in the ‘Description’ box that the copy begins with two characters ‘*^’. Well, as an added bonus of using the Flickr Uploadr to get photos on Flickr, I also use it as a front-end to insert photos on my own blog and to also send links to them on Twitter.

With the use of the magic API, RSS, I have two separate crontab scripts running that read my personal Flickr RSS feed and look for these two characters. The * tells the script to take the title and description and add them as posts to my personal blog. The ^ tells the script to grab the title and URL of the image on Flickr (shorten it), then send it on to Twitter in my personal Twitter account. The special characters are a control mechanism that allow me to filter or choose additional syndication for my photos.

I’m going down a geeky path here and will pull back a bit. The Flickr Desktop Uploadr isnt’ something that is brand new or undergone a massive revision lately. What it is to me an many others is a powerful tool built as an add-on to a service to make it more valuable.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Flickr Desktop Uploadr for Photos is a post from: TechStartups.com

This afternoon I noticed something funny happening with Google Reader shared feeds. It seems that feeds are now mixing namespaces for the main content of the posts.

Previously, all content was delivered via the ’summary’ namespace. When I did a check after getting some null data fields in a database I took a look at the shared feed . . . sure enough there was a new namespace, ‘content’ for the main content. Makes sense. But it is a pain if you are expecting everything to be returned as ’summary’.

My guess is that they are saving time and money by not rewriting the original source feed main content namspace. However, it creates an XML namespace soup that is harder to navigate.

When stuff like this happens it makes me nervous, especially when I am building something on the back of it.

The last time this happened Twitter turned off pagination for getting recent tweets for your friends. It killed a really cool project that I spent more time working on than I care to recount. I’m hoping that Google will not do the same. Fingers crossed.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Using The Magic API is a post from: TechStartups.com