Friday, March 10, 2006

flickr tool - for h4ppier photos

Ever been frustrated with the Flickr Organizr? Wished there was a way to find (and date filter) the photos you have not yet put into sets? Then put the ones you've found into an existing or new set? Now you can - with h4ppier photos.



I finally got too frustrated with the flickr Organizr last weekend and took my first look into the flickr API, using phpFlickr to access it. I was pleasantly surprised - it's both easy to use and powerful (both flickr and phpFlickr have done a great job) - and my first flickr baby was born. I call it "h4ppier photos":
http://www.h4ppy.com/h4ppier-photos-test.php

If you have a flickr account take a look some time, and let me know if you find the application useful. It lets you search and filter your photos by date or tag and find what photos you have that you have not yet put into any sets. At the moment you can only add these photos to sets, but I'll try and add more actions soon, like tagging the pics you've found or setting the license or other details.

If you have any suggestions or feedback, please post a comment!

49 Comments:

At 4:29 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love h4ppierphotos app for flickr Thanks Christian! I have put several hundred photos into sets without any complaints! As I use the app I will make an effort to give you ideas for improvement but at this time it is doing everything I need.

V/R

-Jeff

 
At 3:37 PM, Blogger Brian Sawyer said...

Thank you so much, h4ppy. The Greasemonkey script I'd used in the past doesn't seem to work anymore with the current versions of Greasemonkey/Firefox, but your app did the trick easily and effectively. Nice work!

 
At 4:53 PM, Blogger TW said...

This has been an incredibly useful tool for me. Is there a way to add an option for us to list photos by privacy flag? (i.e. private, family only, friends only, family&friends, or public)?

 
At 3:08 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great app dude. Good use of the class.

 
At 8:40 PM, Blogger Christian said...

I'm back from holiday - thanks for the comments whilst I was away!

Brian, you're welcome.

Andrew, there is a 60 second time on the cache... at the moment I would recommend just waiting a few seconds then searching again. If this is an issue for many people I'll look at removing the cache or reducing the time it lasts.

Pat and Albert, I'm afraid that there is not (at the moment) any simple way to do this using the flickr API. If this changes in future I will, of course, add this feature :)

And for the anonymous poster called 'me' - this is now possible! You can now use h4ppier photos to search by privacy setting. I will add options to allow you to use hp to set your privacy settings soon.

C

 
At 9:12 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

wonderful!

i reeeealy would love to see these flickr tools support *not* operations, however! ;-) (i.e. exclude items with the following tags)

 
At 11:28 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Wow, christian. thank you so much for an amazing application. if only those features were part of the flickr organizr. i will send people your way!

thanks again,
stephanie

 
At 1:36 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Christian,

This is an awesome application - thank you! I've been uploading some of my old photos and changed the date uploaded on all of them to match the date taken. The only glitch I've encountered is that the earliest date is 12/31/1969. Is it possible to use earlier dates? Some of mine go back to 1941.

Thanks,
chanuck

 
At 9:39 AM, Blogger Christian said...

Hi Chanuck,

I don't put any limitations on the dates (well, I don't think I do!), so if there's a limit in 1969 it's probably a flickr (or more general computer) limitation.

I remember reading a thread a while ago where people recommended:
* setting the date for photos before this time as 12/31/1969
* set the wrong time, so that later photos appear after earlier ones (e.g. photos from 1968 set to 12/31/1969 23:30, photos from 1967 to 12/31/1969 23:00, etc)
* using tags to define the real year

I hope that helps and provides a usable workaround!

 
At 5:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Excellent tool. My one suggestion is to allow users to type their own descriptions to be assigned to group of photos rather than only having the option to import descriptions from exif.

 
At 4:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

One word: thanks !

 
At 10:00 PM, Blogger joe said...

First off, thanks very much. This was desperately needed.

I would like to promote your app on my flickr pages. (Maybe I shouldn't, since the app may then become overwhelmed with users...) But is there a way to display a little banner for your site on my photo pages? I think there is a way to do so on my profile page, but I don't know how to anywhere else.

 
At 2:03 PM, Blogger Christian said...

Hi Joe,

I don't think there's a way to change your photo pages, other than writing descriptions on your photos.

However, a link from your flickr profile, website or blog is most welcome - anything we can do to spread a little h4ppiness :)

Also, feel free to post a positive message here:
http://www.flickr.com/forums/ideas/26254/

When you do it bounces the thread to the top of the list and increases the chances more people will find out about hp.

Thanks again and I'm glad you found the app useful!

C

 
At 10:37 PM, Blogger Dan said...

Using this and I'm very h4ppy with it, but one thing that I think is a bug:

If I select a set from the menu "Choose a set to only show photos from that set" and then click to show photos, it shows all photos, not just those in the set???

 
At 3:39 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This a great utility, with just the tool I need: adding EXIF data to the tags or description. I was wondering, though, is there any way to pick which EXIF info to add (for example camera type) to the tags/description? If no, are there plans for this in the future?

 
At 7:58 PM, Blogger Eddie said...

I'm having some issues with it - love the idea tho.

It doesn't seem to respect the "only show in set" filter. Could you check that out and tell me if I'm on crack?

 
At 7:21 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mate, I just opened a Flikr account and uploaded 94 photos. I was frustrated that they were displayed in random order - not by date taken. I found your application and Bingo! it's done!!

Well done for a simple and wonderfully functional application!

 
At 11:49 AM, Blogger cragrat said...

This has helped solve a few of my Flickr problems.Cheers. The one problem I have had is in the search stage (advanced) no matter what dates I put in either "taken" or "uploaded" it shows the number of pictures I have specified in the order specified - no date selection.

If it makes any difference I am using Firefox with OS X

 
At 4:31 PM, Blogger Bruce said...

This is by far the best online flickr management tool there is. Great work!

Maybe someday you could make it look and feel smooth and groovy :)

 
At 6:17 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Excellent work! Uploaded a huge batch with photos of Costa Rica and managed to get the upload date right.

Just one request; An option to delete any description made by some upload tools.

 
At 9:53 PM, Blogger Uqbar said...

What a handy application you made!

I thing it would be nice to be able to change the upload date to an absolute date/time, not only to time-shift them.

That way one could move pictures s/he doesn't want cluttering the photostream to - say - the day s/he signed in to flickr, so they all stay there together and don't keep popping up here and there in the 'stream.

Cheers,
Uqbar

 
At 4:26 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

By far the most useful program for flickr, it's simply amazing.

Getting the dates "photo taken" and "uploaded" to match is an incredibly efficient way to sort out my stream,

I started doing it manually...what a chore. A big thank you, it's brilliant.

happyjohn...sorted 18000 photos easily thanks to h4ppy.com

 
At 3:14 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I love this application, thanks for letting me sort my photo stream to match the date taken.

However, I have to search for 200 photos at a time, any more and the results times out.

I am in China and so not the fastest of connections and I guess there is some distance to reach your server as well!

I would love it so say 'showing 200 (of 488) matches'.

Thanks so much for playing with the API!

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 4864 bytes) in /usr/lib/phpflickr/phpFlickr/PEAR/HTTP/Request.php(759) : runtime-created function on line 1

 
At 3:31 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tool. I just have one more request... Is there a way to have the tool rad the exif date taken field and write it back into the date take field?

I know that should not be an issue, but I was messing around with batch edit in order to try to change the order of the photo stream. I changed all the dates in the batch edit mode, thinking it would change the date uploaded field instead of the date taken field. So now all my photos have the same date in the date taken. I want to fix that without having to edit each photo separately or deleting and re-uploading 1300 pictures.

I can be reached on flickermail at dman999992002.

Thanks
D

 
At 7:32 PM, Blogger Doug said...

I just tried changing dates of a batch of several hundred photos ahead 4 years, 1 month and 25 days, doing each one incrementally, and when I looked back at the flickr archives, some were moved ahead 8 years, the order of my pictures was completely messed up, and I have no no idea where to even begin trying to fix it....great idea for an app, but it seems like there are some bugs. My photos are not so happy - Am I seriously the only one that has had this problem?

 
At 10:32 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

bloody brilliant program, hats off to you sir!

 
At 9:00 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

it would be cool if you could add an interface for allowing photo ids in the url, or sent to the app via a http post, that way you could select the images in another application, then send them to your application for processing, im thinking along the lines of a greasemonkey script that lets you select the images you have chosen in flickrs own organizer, and send them to your application, that would be pretty cool! :)

 
At 9:21 AM, Blogger Nuclear Fire said...

Thank you so much for this great program.

 
At 1:15 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

excellent, terrific app

however, when i try to sync the upload dates to the date taken, it is 5 hours early

any1 else with this?

thx for all the hard work

~Chris

 
At 1:21 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

ok i previous stated that changing the upload date is off by 5 hours .... well it's 6 ... and i see now how you can use the app to correct this, bravo!

here's a question how tho. ... would it be possible to export the upload/taken dates into a calendar web application or some sort of calendar view. ... thanks for the app

~Chris

 
At 1:24 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

hah I'm new to Flickr

you can do that with Archive ....

~Chris

 
At 7:04 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

thanks very much, one of my camera's had the wrong year, so I needed a time shift more than a day :-)

 
At 2:52 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Great! I love the ability to change the photostream date to the date taken to reorder my photostream.

 
At 9:05 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

Thanks so much for creating this! I took a bunch of wedding pictures for a friend, and I didn't really want everyone to see them at the top of my photostream, I only wanted them in the set. Now it's as though they were taken ten years ago, perfect!

 
At 1:16 AM, Blogger Petyr Rahl said...

I'm having some trouble getting it to remove a tag for me. I've gota batch of photos that due to the wonder of the flickr uploader, have a tag in there that I didn't intend to be there. Anyhow when I click on the remove tag from the selected photos, I go right back to the search page, and none of my photos have been modified. User error? Bug?

Thanks,
Paul

 
At 7:35 AM, Blogger Moni said...

great tool, i use it all the time. but how can i change the upload date of only a select number of photos to "today's date".

 
At 9:09 AM, Blogger Moni said...

i figured out how to change selected flickr photos to today's date. thanks!

 
At 11:53 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Nice application, but I had some questions.

1. it would be nice to be able to change the date uploaded date to a specific date i.e. 1/12/2006 at 2:14:37. This can be an additional option in addition to 'Addding' and 'Subtracting'

2. Is there a way to implement more than one change at the same time?

3. When I implement a change all the searched photos are no longer available. I have to search for them again.

 
At 8:32 PM, Blogger JandM said...

Hi Christian - thanks so much for such a great tool. I use it pretty much everytime I upload photos to change the upload date to match the taken date.

One issue I'm having is that the --Choose a Set-- option never seems to pick the correct set. Any help would be appreciated.

Many thanks

 
At 8:34 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

This tool is a lifesaver. I recently uploaded 300+ older photos and needed to reorder my photostream. Everything worked great!

 
At 4:10 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Awesome! Marvelous work sir. Thank you for sharing your wonderful tool!! Has been a huge help.
Bruce

 
At 2:28 PM, Blogger Unknown said...

THANK YOU!!

I still think FLICKR owes it's users more SORTING control but your tool/site is a life-saver! I'm currenting cranking through 1000s of my photos to get rid of that BLASTED "upload-date" nonsense!

/cheer

- Chris

 
At 8:52 PM, Anonymous geert said...

Thx for your great tool. I made my family happy by uploading a bunch of photos and was able to put them at the back of my photostream in a set.
Great tool you have!

 
At 3:13 PM, Blogger Moni said...

is the app still working? i am unable to change the upload date to the date taken ... something going on?

 
At 2:12 PM, Anonymous vanessa harden said...

hello! I have a bit of a problem. whenever i try to change the order of my photostream, i get this error...why? and how can this be fixed?

The Flickr API returned error code #4: Invalid date_posted

-vanessa

 
At 10:37 AM, Blogger Unknown said...

Did Flickr break something in the API? I ask because h4ppier flickr photos has been broken past two weeks - no photos are found when searching. :(

 
At 6:02 PM, Blogger Wil said...

FYI: the "Flickr Forum" link on your web page just leads to the Flickr Ideas group... not to a forum about your app. Thought you'd like to know.

 
At 10:27 PM, Anonymous DJ Damian said...

Thanks for a utility that better manages my photos then that offered by Flickr.

It appears there my be a bug with your "Search All Photos" button when choosing a set.

In my example, I have created a set called "Test" that includes 235 photos. I wanted to changed the "uploaded" date on those photos. When I select the "Test" set and hit the "Search All Photos" button, the photos that appear are NOT in the test set.

My email address is "dukedyno@yahoo.com" should you need more info. Thanks for your help in advance.

Damian

 
At 5:12 AM, Blogger Fabrizio Capobianco said...

Hi Christian,
great tool. I would love a way to change the title for all the photos in one single batch.

Thanks!

 

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