Tutorial: How to Make a Flickr Uploader: Part II
This article is part of a 2 part series – check out my initial post on building a Flickr uploader.
Traditional “Contextual Menu Style” Image Uploader
My method of choice requires slightly more effort each time I upload, but provides much more freedom in naming, tagging and describing my individual photos. Rather than uploading a pre-designated folder’s contents in every run of the plug-in, it will only upload that image (or those images) that are selected in Finder. In other words this plug-in will act a bit more like the contextual menu actions you may have used before – like the “Create Archive of… ” and “Toast It” contextual menu commands.
First, in Automator, create a new workflow and add to it a Finder “Get Selected Items” action. This is what will pass your selected image or images to the upload step. Next drop in an “Upload to Flickr” action. This time, there won’t likely be a single theme that is carried through all of my uploaded photos so I will leave the Title and Description input-boxes blank.
Fortunately, I usually use the same camera so it’ll save me some typing if I add in some of my camera information into the Tags input-box. Because those aren’t the only tags I’ll use, I’m going to select the “Upload to Flickr” action’s “Show Action When Run” option. Now when the workflow is run a prompt will open allowing me to append a name, description and further tags to my image. Honestly this method is not ideal for multiple photos because only one prompt will show even when many images are in the queue.
After I’ve uploaded an image I often like to catalogue it away in the “Pictures” folder of my home directory. To do this, simply add a “Move Finder Items” action to the workflow then select your desired destination from the “To:” drop-down menu.
Again, like the first plug-in you will need to “Save As Plug-in…” your workflow, giving it a relevant and meaningful name so it can be accessed from the Finder’s contextual menus and you can remember what it does in the future.
Cleaning up Finder Plug-ins.
Since you now have the ability to make Finder plug-ins, you might eventually find yourself wanting to eliminate a particular plug-in you no longer have need for. This isn’t very difficult, but is a good thing to know about. The Finder Automator plug-ins folder is located at Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Library/Workflows /Applications/Finder. When you’ve opened this folder you can simply drag unwanted plug-ins to the trash to uninstall them from your contextual menu.
I really hope that this tutorial has helped you get an even better grasp on working with Automator and also introduced you to a helpful and convenient method for sharing your photos on Flickr using Finder plug-ins. Check back for more tutorials, or subscribe to our RSS feed for updates.
You can also add the Preview action “Scale Images”, but make sure that you copy the original file to a temporary folder first.
I’ve also added a Growl Notification, so that I can see when the files have finished uploading.