Despite Apple trying to catch up to modern times with their fabled .Mac Web Gallery, there’s already a leader in sharing photos with friends on the internet–and one that’s a whole lot cheaper than .Mac. We all know it as Flickr, the site where anyone can upload their photos and share it with other contacts on the web–one of the websites most recognized with Web 2.0. And for a $25/year pro account (which I recently indulged myself with), you can upload as many photos you want, with no upload or bandwidth limits–that’s for a quarter of a price of .Mac and a lot more features. But, when you have a Pro account, that means that you’re going to want to upload all of your photos to Flickr as easily as possible. If you use a Mac, there’s a number of tools out there to do that (because everyone knows that uploading it through the web browser is boring and tedious), including one that Flickr themselves maintains, but the easiest and best tool, by far, has to be the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto.

What’s unique about the FlickrExport plugin is that it’s the only one that actually integrates directly into the iPhoto page. Whereas most of the other options have some kind of outside app that might have a media browser, or most of them which ask you to drag in photos to the application, and then they always mess up the perfect order that you wanted. However, FlickrExport resides in iPhoto’s Export panel (Shift-Command-E), as another exporting option alongside File Export, Web Page (did you know iPhoto can export a basic web page by itself without using iWeb?), and QuickTime.

When you first open the FlickrExport panel, you’ll be asked to click the button to go to Flickr so that you can authorize FlickrExport to, you know, mess with your photostream. FlickrExport will save your login for future use, unless you press its Log Out button. If you aren’t a pro member (they get unlimited bandwidth), FlickrExport will also show how much bandwidth you’ve already used for the month.

All of the photos that you want to export will be shown on the left–and it is possible to select multiple photos so that you can adjust certain settings for all of those photos at once. You can then set the Title, Description, and Tags (separated by spaces) for your photos. If any of this information is already set in iPhoto, it will display iPhoto’s data. Also, you can turn on an option in FlickrExport so that once it exports the photos to Flickr, it will copy the Title and Description you entered into the local metadata for your iPhoto photos. Also convenient, the right side of the FlickrExport window displays all of your tags that already belong to your Flickr photos, and you can also search through your Flickr tags with a search box.

FlickrExport also includes privacy settings, so you can choose to make your photos public or private (if private, you can allow friends and/or family to view your photos). You can also set the safety level of your photos and what kind of content it is (Photo/Screenshot/Other), as well as the scale. FlickrExport can be set to just upload the photos into your Photostream, or it can upload them into an existing photoset or create a new one. If you’re part of a group pool, it can also add the photos to one group pool as well.

Once you hit Export, FlickrExport will automatically convert all of your photos into the appropriate settings and upload them. When the export is done, Flickr will open in your web browser to show you all of the just-uploaded photos so you can make some post-upload changes if you want to.

I’ve tried a number of Flickr programs since I went pro, and by far, FlickrExport for iPhoto has been the easiest and most pleasing to use. Granted, it does cost a little bit of money (around US$20 depending on the Pound<->Dollar conversion), but if you’re a heavy iPhoto/Flickr user, it will totally be worth it.

Final Rating:

NOTE: There is also a similar plugin available from the same author for Aperture, available under a separate license.

Tags: export, Flickr, iPhoto, photos, plug-in, review, Software