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Flickr upload tool turns 3.0, goes open-source

Let the porting begin: Uploadr 3.0 is not only out of beta, it's also governed by the GPL now.

Stephen Shankland Former Principal Writer
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
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  • Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Stephen Shankland

Flickr on Thursday released a new version of its tool for uploading photos to the Yahoo photo-sharing site, and made it an open-source program in the process.

Flickr Uploadr 3.0, available for Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 and for Windows XP and Vista is now available in source code form, too, governed by version 2 of the General Public License (GPL). Open-source software may be freely modified, copied, and shared; opening source code could let programmers modify the Uploadr tool so it works on Linux or uploads to other photo-sharing sites, for example.

Uploadr lets photographers select photos for upload, add tags, organize them into sets, and change privacy settings. Among the changes in Version 3 is the ability to set the photo order in sets and to add new photos to the upload queue while others are in the process of being transferred.

Uploadr 3.0 also inherits Flickr's multilanguage support: English, French, traditional Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.

Flickr also released a new statistics tool Thursday for pro users (pro accounts cost $25 per year but are free for those who get DSL through Yahoo-branded deals). Flickr Stats shows whence visitors came to look at your photos, either from within Flickr or outside on the Web.

Stats also shows totals for recent viewings of photos and compiles data such as how many photos have tags, geotags, and comments. Views of your photos can be sorted by viewing totals, comments, favorite status, and the ever-elusive "interestingness" ranking.