bobafred

Since my move to Linux, I’ve had to explore new options for things I did in Windows. One such thing is uploading photos to flickr. Flickr recommends jUploadr on their tools page for cross-platform uploading, so I figured I’d give it a spin.

jUploadr is Java based, so you’ll need a runtime installed first. By default, the latest versions of Ubuntu come with GCJ installed, which is the GNU Compiler for Java. It seems that GCJ doesn’t fully support all that needs to be supported for jUploadr to work, though, so you have to do some work to get things prepared.

Here are the steps I took to get jUploadr up and running:

1. Install Sun Java: This was actually pretty easy thanks to the great documentation at the Ubuntu site. Follow the instructions for Installing Sun Java and you should be good.
2. Uninstall GCJ: This isn’t really necessary, but I like to keep things tidy. I used the Synaptic Package Manager to find and remove GCJ. This is nice because it also finds and removes other packages that rely on GCJ. Again, tidiness is good.
3. Download, uncompress and remember where you put jUploadr.
4. Lastly, I created a custom application launcher in the panel at the top of my desktop. Right-click on the panel > Add to Panel > Custom Application Launcher. Then just tell it where the jUploadr shell script lives and you’re good. Or, you can double-click on the script and select run. Or, you can run it from a terminal window. There are many options here.

Something to note is that if you try to uninstall GCJ before you have another JRE installed, Synaptic will also try to remove OpenOffice and any other applications that require Java support. Don’t do that.

jUploadr is pretty nice. You can set the title and description for a photo before you upload it, which you can’t do with the official flickr Windows uploader. Also, you can add tags for individual photos instead of for all of the photos that you are uploading. You can create sets and add photos to them, or just add photos to already existing sets. I haven’t really played with it enough to offer up more than that, but it’s nice and zippy, so I’ll keep it.

It should also be mentioned that jUploadr works with Zooomr, and may even be their official uploader. I think I read that somewhere.

Finally, there will probably be more posts like this as I find things that might be helpful for people trying to migrate to Linux.