In the past, I’ve written about Adobe’s new AIR product. AIR in this case stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime, which is Adobe’s attempt to bring the Desktop and the Internet closer together. There are already many, many applications written for AIR, and Adobe recently introduced a pre-release version for Linux, which got me interested in AIR all over again.
In this article, I’ll be talking about a nice Flickr uploader written for the AIR platform, called ImageDropr. As it turns out, even though it was Adobe’s release of AIR for Linux that got me looking at AIR applications again, I ran ImageDropr on Mac OSX, as there are still some issues with the Linux version.
ImageDropr has most of the tools you’d expect from a standard Flickr uploader. It allows the user to drag multiple images onto its window, then tag each individually or all at once. Group tags can be applied as well, and images can be given public or private permissions.
Doing the above is very simple. As mentioned, you can either drag your images onto the ImageDropr window, or copy them from the Finder and paste them in. Either way, you’ll quickly be shown a small thumbnail image representing each image you want to upload to your Flickr account.
As mentioned, you can apply tags either to the whole group or individually. If all your to-be-uploaded images will belong to the same group, you can use the Tags text area at the bottom of the screen. If you’d like to apply different tags to individual items, simply hover over a thumbnail, and you’ll see two icons appear. The red “X” – as you might expect – will delete the image from your upload queue, while the other – a pencil and paper – will bring up that image’s preferences.
From this area, you can give your image a title, description, individual tags, and also select whether or not to include group tags or global tag. You can also – from this area as well as the main window – choose whether or not an image is public or private.
Once you’re done applying an image’s information, simply hit the Save button and you’ll return to the main window. When you’ve tagged and labeled everything to your liking, you’re ready to start the upload. It should be mentioned here that nowhere in ImageDropr will you find a place to log into your Flickr account. This is because Flickr manages third-party uploading utilities by requiring you to verify – from inside your Flickr account – that a particular application has your “okay” as a tool. You’ll need to log into your Flickr account here, but nowhere in ImageDropr.
Just in case you were wondering.
Back to uploading. It’s really simple. Hit the upload button, and you’ll see the progress bar move from left to right along the bottom of the window, representing the overall progress. As your upload progresses, you’ll also see progress bars under each picture, and as an individual picture is finished uploading, it will disappear from view. When all the pictures are gone… you’re done uploading!
And that’s ImageDropr. As mentioned, it has pretty much what you’d expect from a Flickr uploader, and works quite well. The fact that it’s running on the AIR platform is a curiosity – and the reason I even tried out ImageDropr in the first place – but in my view that fact doesn’t affect the program’s speed or usability. ImageDropr works well, starts up quickly, and seems right at home on my Mac’s desktop.
If you’d like to try out ImageDropr, Adobe AIR or any of the other AIR applications, you can head over to the main Adobe AIR website to download and install the AIR runtime, then to the Adobe AIR Marketplace, to try out a cool new AIR app.
