Flickr and iPhoto

While having a wander around iPhoto, I found a rather nice little feature - subscribing to photo feeds. iPhoto can subscribe to RSS feeds, such as those provided by Flickr, allowing you to see your friends' latest photos in one place. Just grab the RSS URL from near the bottom of a contact's site (this can be for the whole site, or just a set or collection), and in iPhoto, select File | Subscribe to Photo Feed, and paste in the URL. iPhoto will grab the most recent photos from their site (it looks like 20 is the default). The only problem that I can see is that double-clicking on a thumbnail doesn't take you to the hi-res version, instead magnifying the default lo-res version, so it's not perfect, but it's a good way of keeping an eye on what your friends have been up to.

Integrating Flickr with Lightroom

I've long been a Flickr fan, and more recently, a firm Adobe Lightroom fan. With the recent release of version 1.3 of Lightroom, Adobe has started opening it up to third-party developers, and Jeffrey Friedl has put two and two together, creating what is sure to be a very popular plug-in, allowing you to export directly from Lightroom to Flickr.

I haven't upgraded from version 1.2 yet, but I will do very shortly. One of the big annoyances for me is tagging all my photos carefully in Lightroom, then having to tag them all over again in Flickr. Hopefully, this plug-in will automatically copy them over, as well as saving me the trouble of wading through Explorer looking for photos to upload.

UPDATE: the good news it that it does, as well as other metadata. The Title and Description fields can be populated from several different ITPC fields in Lightroom (selectable in the plug-in), and the tags are all copied over. Now, I wonder if you can have a tag-exclusion list (so, for example, I could add a tag in Lightroom to indicate that the photo had been uploaded to Flickr, then if I wanted to re-upload it, that tag wouldn't get uploaded too).