I like Picasa, especially since a recent update means when you Save changes, it really Saves like you’d expect. But I also like Flickr, and the two don’t have drag-and-drop compatibility as far as I know. So I did a little searching for updates and found that I don’t have the latest version of the Flickr uploader, for one thing.

While that downloads (slow connection while on vacation here in Maui), here’s a post from Lifehacker from a couple of years ago that offers a solution towards a more efficient workflow when dealing with lots of images.

Perfect Your Picasa to Flickr Workflow – Digital Photos – Lifehacker

Desktop photo manager Picasa is a Google product, and photo-sharing web site Flickr’s owned by Yahoo, and the two companies don’t make it obvious how to get the apps to talk to one another. When I returned home from a vacation on the beaches of Thailand, I had a hard drive loaded with photos and I wanted a way to organize, caption, and publish them all at once without duplicating work. Here’s how I did it with Picasa and Flickr.

The Problem: When you’re jet-lagged and you have hundreds of photos to edit, sort, organize, and caption, you don’t want to do any more work than you must. While it’s easy to simply export or email a few photos at a time out of Picasa to upload and title, caption, and tag in Flickr itself, I wanted to caption my photos once in Picasa and send that information to Flickr. I also wanted to organize my photos into sets—or “albums” as they’re called in Picasa—and mirror those sets on the web and the desktop.

The Solution: While Picasa does have a handy “Email this” function which you can use in conjunction with Flickr’s upload by email feature, it’s not easy to make sets, set multiple privacy levels, add tags, and titles via email. For all that you want the newest version 3.0 of the Flickr Uploadr application, which works on both Windows and Mac. (But, if you’re using Picasa, you’re on Windows. Sorry, Mac peeps.) The Flickr Uploadr acts as the middleman between Picasa and Flickr.

Oh, my. I wonder if it’s worth trying to install this plugin?

• Run Picasa
• Select photos to import
• Click on “Send To flickr!” button
• A “Sending to flickr Uloadr” progress bar should appear
• Wait until uploadr start
• An “Import” button should appear when all the queue have been analyzed
• Click on “Import” button to start the upload

My word, that seemed to go well so far – the button installed pretty much as detailed in the instructions, and now I have a Flickr button on Picasa… currently I only have one photo in my Maui 2010 set on Flickr, because frankly I worked on one image and got distracted by all the stuff I wanted to be doing while actually on vacation. So here goes.

Oops, first have to make sure Uploadr update has finished (slow, slow connection). There was something in yesterday’s news about ATT’s service getting screwed up, too – so we were unable to call anybody on our iPhones, had we been somewhere that actually had service. But we were off in Hana where there’s no ATT coverage to speak of, so we were unaware of the outage, tra la la.

Well, hey, that’s pretty painless! I did use the suggestion from the first link to export to a folder named “Maui 2010 to Flickr” as the only way to batch resize is to “export” images to an album or folder.

When blogging a lot of photos, I had been in the habit of uploading to my Picasa web albums, which are a bit of a mess as Picasa has this tendency to start a new album for every batch, something that I don’t necessarily want. But it’s harder to get a decent link off of them, as Picasa seems to want to put links to photos within tables. Sometimes I’d just rather work with the choices Flickr offers in “all sizes.”

So there you have it, a small batch of photos uploaded to Flickr, very easily direct from Picasa. Hurray for Sourceforge plugins!