I’ve been mas-uploading photos to Facebook recently – not really my cup of tea but its a great way of sharing the holiday snaps with the Indonesian contingent of the family who are mostly young and into facebooking etc. Considering the trials and tribulations I’ve been through I might save some of you the heart/headaches by summing up my experience for you.
I’m on a Mac, of course, so read no further if you live on the dark side.
I use Photo Mechanic and Aperture for my day-to-day handling of photos so this is where I started. There’s no plug-in / extension for Photo Mechanic that I could find and I didn’t expect there to be one but there is one for Aperture, Facebook Exporter. On the whole I found this unreliable and tedious to use. Its only at version 0.5.2 so I’ll keep an eye on it and see if it shows more promise. Next – staying completely in Apple land – I tried using the iPhoto (’09) Facebook uploader, even though I try to avoid having my picks in both Aperture and iPhoto. The iPhoto uploader does work seamlessly and uses the captions (titles) you give your photos on Facebook but not the faces data. In iPhoto you basically turn an existing folder into a Facebook folder so if you are an iPhoto fan this may be the solution for you. Don’t change your mind and try to back out of using iPhoto though because if you delete a Facebook folder from iPhoto it will delete it and all the photos it contains from the Facebook site.
Not happy with iPhoto, my search continued with Google’s Picasa and the Picasa Uploader. I had some trouble installing it but got it working after a few tries. If you need to install the Facebook button (Picasa Uploader) by hand it needs to be put in the following folder: ‘/Applications/Picasa.app/Contents/Resources/buttons’. Of course now I was back at the same place I was with iPhoto. I did not want to have to use another photo organizing application just to upload to Face book even if it did do a reasonable job. If your a user and fan of Picasa I’d recommend it but not for me. I don’t use the Picasa web site for images, and I’ve never been a fan of the Picasa application (possibly my least favorite from Google and I love most of them) which I find clumsy and unintuitive at times. In particular Picasa doesn’t have the smarts to combine the RAW and the Jpeg of the same image into one reference thumbnail. So sorry Picasa you still have not won me over.
What I thought I needed now, in the absence of a decent plug-in for Aperture, was a stand-alone application that I could use in conjunction with my chosen photo organizing application(s). There is the Adobe Photo Uploader for Facebook based on the Adobe AIR platform. Not sure why they called it ‘Photo Uploader for Facebook’ as it really is a more general Facebook client. The uploaded is reasonable but has some drawbacks. You cant see images that are already uploaded to an existing album and when you tag people in photos it is blissfully unaware of your friends list it can also be painfully slow at times but then again I’ve never been impressed by Adobe AIR applications in general. So thumbs down to that one.
That just leaves one final serious contender that I could find and whilst it does have some serious bugs / annoyances it is my pick of a very average lot and that is Bloom. “Bloom is a multi platform desktop app that let you upload your photos and videos easily and efficiently to Facebook, download albums and view your friends’ photos”. Could not have put it better myself. For me this does the job. You can drag-and-drop photos from Aperture (and iPhoto for that matter) or the finder, caption photos quickly and tag your friends easily using a list that is aware of your friends (even shows you an avatar of them in case you forget names like I do). Its quick to, probably because it only uploads small size images. Which is all I really want when sharing the family snaps. Being a Java app it can be a little flaky. I suggest always checking the albums you create with it on the Facebook site have all the correct settings. There is one major bug to look out for: If you have a photo with a caption selected and then select all the photos in an album Bloom will set the caption of all the photos to that first photo’s caption, really annoying but avoidable. So despite these few niggles Bloom is my choice today for uploading photos to Facebook.
