As a photo management application, Facebook sucks. But it is something that people actually look at (as opposed to Flickr, which is great, but getting people to log-in or follow special guest pass links is a PITA).

I like to keep all my raw photos locally, using IPTC for comments (which Flickr reads -- I put them in using some custom scripts and the Python bindings of libiptcdata) and geo-tagged in the EXIF data (using my google maps point locator). I figure this way if Flickr goes bust/gets bought by Microsoft all I need to do is re-upload somewhere else.

I was waiting for Flickr to integrate with Facebook in some good way, but I then came across the very useful pyfacebook bindings, which, although being a little light on documentation, is a great way to easily throw my photos into Facebook (it's pending the NEW queue in Debian, see #511279).

My fbupload.py script might be a useful starting point if you want to do the same thing. It batches up photos into lots of 60 (the maximum photos in an album) and automatically creates the albums and uploads the photos, reading the IPTC data for comments. The only problem is that you'll have to sign up for a developer key and start a new application to get a secret key to talk to the API (if you're still reading this, I'm sure you can figure it out!).

posted at: Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:31 | in /code/web | permalink | add comment (6 others)