If you are a Flickr fan as well as a Linux user, you probably know that the only way you can access the service officially is through its Web app. While that’s not an issue, per se, there’s a large section of Internet users that prefer using dedicated client applications to access Web-based services, which I think is a matter of personal preference.
If you’re looking for a good third-party Flickr client app that lets you do at least some of the basic tasks like uploading a photo and editing its details, look no further, as in this article we will be discussing a tool called Frogr that lets you do exactly that.
Note that the article will focus on getting the tool up and running on Ubuntu so that you can upload images to Flickr.
Frogr
Frogr is primarily a Flickr upload app for the GNOME desktop environment, but it works fine with Unity (which is default for Ubuntu) as well. It supports all the basic features offered by the popular Yahoo-owned photo management service including uploading pictures, adding descriptions, setting tags, and managing sets and groups pools.
Download and Install
To download and install the Frogr app run the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mariospr/frogr sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install frogr
Once installed successfully, you can launch the application by running the following command:
frogr
Usage
When the Frogr application is run for the first time, you need to authorize it so that it can successfully connect to your Flickr account. The following window appears as the application is run.
Click the “OK” button, and the following web page will open.
Here, click the “OK, I’LL AUTHORIZE IT” button, and you’ll be presented with a nine-digit code that you have to enter into your application.
Once the code is entered into the window shown above, click the “Close” button, and you’ll see Frogr connect to your Flickr account successfully (see the bottom of the screenshot shown below).
Now, to upload a photo to your Flickr account, first click the button that has a green-colored “+” icon on it and then select a picture. For example, here’s the Frogr UI after I selected a photo that I wanted to upload:
Before you start uploading, you can edit the details of the picture by going to “Edit -> Edit Details.”
Here’s the “Edit Picture Details” window.
As you can see, you can set the visibility, safety level, and license type, as well as specify the type of content. Then there are text boxes where you can specify title, description, and tags. And finally, there are also some other properties that you can set, like whether or not you want the image to show up in Global Search Results.
Once you’re done with the editing part, you can easily start the upload process by selecting “File -> Upload All” or clicking the orange-colored up arrow button on the top. If the upload is successful, the image will disappear from the Frogr UI, and you’ll see a notification in the Flickr web app about a new upload.
Click the “Refresh” button, and you’ll see that the image you’ve uploaded through Frogr appears in your Flickr account.
This way you can perform the basic upload operation. Note that we’ve used only one image in our example, but that doesn’t mean you can’t batch upload – of course you can.
Now, suppose you’ve added multiple photos to Frogr and are editing their details before uploading, but you want to close the application and resume the work later for some reason. Is this possible? Yes, it is. You can save the current work as a project and then open that project later.
Creating a project is simple. Just select “File -> Save As…” and enter the project name. Frogr projects are saved with the “.frogr” extension, and you can easily open them by right-clicking on their icon and selecting “Open With -> Frogr.”
Conclusion
While Frogr doesn’t offer a plethora of features, it does what it promises – lets you edit image details and upload images to Flickr. It’s particularly useful in scenarios where you want somebody else (who has physical access to your PC) to upload pics to your Flickr account but don’t want to give them access to the Web app.
So go ahead, give it a try.
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Himanshu Arora
Himanshu Arora is a freelance technical writer by profession but a software programmer and Linux researcher at heart. He covers software tutorials, reviews, tips/tricks, and more. Some of his articles have been featured on IBM developerworks, ComputerWorld, and in Linux Journal.
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