Aperture » Flickr: Automator Workflow
27 April 2006
Filed under Mac, Photography, Technology, Text, The Interweb
If you’re an Aperture user who lives for Flickr, this Automator workflow might be useful. I can’t support it, and nor can I guarantee that it won’t chop up everything on your HD and feed it to the cat, but it works for me.
Once it’s all set up, all you’re required to do is keyword the photos that you want sent to Flickr with ‘Flickr’ and run the workflow (you can even do it with Quicksilver!). Feel free to let me know via the comments if there’s any way I could make the actual setup more painless.
What You’ll Need
- My Headed For Flickr workflow
- Fraser Speirs’ Flickr Upload action for Automator.
You then need to make two Smart Folders in Aperture, one for photos you want to upload, and one for the photos you’ve already uploaded (technically, the second one isn’t required). I’ve called mine ‘To Flickr’ and ‘Uploaded’.
‘To Flickr’ has two criteria:
- Keywords include ‘Flickr’ AND
- IPTC keywords don’t include ‘Flickrd’ I also checked ‘ignore stack groupings’.
‘Uploaded’ has just the one criterion:
- Keywords include ‘Flickrd’.
You also need to make an export setting in Aperture for your Flickr images (mine’s called JPEG - Flickr, and it’s set to export images no larger than 1600 x 1200; if you haven’t got a Pro account, you’ll probably want to set that to 800 x 800).
After that, you just need to install Fraser’s action, and then open my Headed For Flickr workflow and make a couple of adjustments to it:
- In Step 1, select your ‘To Flickr’ equivalent
- In Step 3, select your Aperture Export Setting (ie, JPEG - Flickr)
- In Step 5, enter your Flickr login details
Once you’ve done these things, all you need to do to get your photos onto Flickr is to keyword them with - you guessed it - ‘Flickr’ - and then run the workflow. What then happens is:
- the photos in your ‘To Flickr’ folder are exported to your ~/Pictures folder according to your selected Export settings,
- those images are then uploaded to Flickr, complete with all associated metadata
- the versions of those files are moved from the Pictures folder to the Trash
- the Aperture versions of the images are then given the keyword ‘Flickrd’, which makes them disappear from the ‘To Flickr’ folder and thus prevents them from being uploaded again.
- Flickr Organizer then opens in your browser so you can make any adjustments and move the newly uploaded images into sets.
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Views from the Floor
Lachlan Hardy says:
That's pretty cool. I'm always after systems for stuff like that (but then, being a Windows monkey at present this particular one doesn't help me), but I wanted to ask what you do about the way Flickr orders your photos?
Doesn't it mess them up if you do a bulk upload? Or don't you care?
Virginia says:
I don't care too much about what happens in the photostream, and I tend to get my Flickr sets to sort in order of date taken. But yeah, it's a bit annoying that I can't set that straight out of Aperture.
Stewf says:
Thank you for offering this to the world, Virginia! I'll give it a go.
Alternatively, one can set up "Flickr Upload" folder and attach a Folder Action workflow to add any new files to a Flickr upload app. I use 1001, but it works just fine with the official Flickr Uploadr app too. With this solution, any image dropped into the folder gets setup for upload and I just export to the folder from Aperture or Photoshop.
Brad says:
I could be wrong but when I run my workflow it gets stuck at the 'uploading to flickr' step. Is this because I have not 'authorized' automator to upload? And how do i do that?
Virginia says:
That can be caused by a couple of things - have you got parentheses or other weird punctuation in the titles of the images? I find that that causes problems occasionally.
The authorisation thing can also cause it - you need to open up the workflow and enter your name and password details into Step 5.
James says:
Hmmm, the action is ppc only. frustrating.
Virginia says:
It didn't occur to me that Automator actions cared: is it because of Fraser Speirs's Flickr action? My workflow could easily be reconstituted on an Intel machine, if Fraser's action is Universal.
Brad says:
My problem was that I was using my yahoo account and not putting '@yahoo.com' after my id. So putting my full yahoo email addy into step 5 of the automator script solved the problem. YAY!! This REALLY makes Aperture rock.
Ben says:
Hi, i always have the same problem. it gets stuck at action number 3 with a message like this: NSInternalScriptError (8). do you have an idea why that is? would be just perfect if it worked.
jev says:
Very nice solution thank you so much
ben says:
On my macbook pro there is nowhere in step 5 to enter a password etc. can you post a screeenshot of what it should look like? Is it possible to get the action to pass the files to the official uploaded, then delete them when finished?
At the moment I get an error message when I open the workflow saying it isn't intel. when I run it everything seems to be working, but nothing actually gets uploaded
Virginia says:
Hi Ben,
The Intel error - and perhaps all the other errors - are caused by the different Automator versions on Intel Macs than on my now-ancient G5 (sook). I'll try to get onto my friend's MacBook this week and churn out a build that'll work for you.
jim says:
Frasiers action does not work on Intel Macs. Try this a universal Flickr upload action that works.
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