Announcing PhotoTeleport, a tool to upload your photos everywhere

I already wrote about PhotoTeleport in my previous post, but since not everyone can comfortably read interlingua, here's the English announcement


I've spent the last few months of my free time to work on a new application, called PhotoTeleport, which is a photo uploader capable of working with multiple photo sharing services at once.

It's an application I myself felt the need for, because as a photographer I keep my portfolio in many websites: I have a couple of pages in Facebook, and VK (a.k.a. "the Russian facebook"), but I also have a profile in other websites such as Flickr and DeviantArt, which I created to further promote my activity, but which alas I failed to keep up-to-date. The harsh reality is that working with multiple profiles is hard: even if you had just two profiles to maintain, it takes a lot of time to upload the photos to both of them and, no matter how convenient their user interface is, entering captions, descriptions and tags here and there is another boring, repetitive and time consuming task.
Then how about automating it? Enter PhotoTeleport, and all photographers rejoice!

The program in itself is very simple: you drag and drop the photos into its window, select which services you want to upload them to, add captions, descriptions and tags (if you like), review and then upload. For those who prefer a feature list in bullet points, here it is:

  • Support many photo sharing services: DeviantArt, Facebook, Flickr, Google Photos, VK, etc. (see here for an updated list)
  • Album selection, or creation of a new album (if the service supports it)
  • Fast editor for captions, descriptions and tags
  • Possibility to specify different captions, descriptions and tags for each website
  • Read metadata embedded in the image files
  • On upload completion, provide a link to the newly uploaded files for additional editing or sharing

This is just a beta version, but more features are planned, including:

  • Ability to save and restore session
  • Watermark support
  • Image scaling
  • Support for more plugins (500px, Imgur, Smugsmug, Shutterstock, Photobucket, Pinterest and more)
  • Support for uploading to a custom (S)FTP server

You are indeed welcome to suggest new features, just by adding a comment to this blog post, or by creating an issue in the PhotoTeleport bug tracker.

PhotoTeleport is available for Linux, MacOS X and Windows; to get it, please visit PhotoTeleport website.

Only for the geeks and the folks from the IT crowd

Here's some info for those who desire to hack on PhotoTeleport, or just to know more about the technology behind id: PhotoTeleport is an open source project, it's written in C++ and QML using the cross-platform Qt framework. The authentication to the remote servers is handled by libauthentication, a library that I wrote just before starting the work on Phototeleport to provide an easy way for Qt and QML based applications to authenticate and peform authorized requests to remove websites using the OAuth 1.0 and OAuth 2.0 protocols (other protocols can be supported too).

Linux users might ask me why I chose to ship PhotoTeleport as an AppImage package, rather than using Flatpak, Snap or a native distribution package like deb or rpm. This might deserve a blog post of its own, but in brief:

  • deb> or rpm: they require root permissions to be installed, moreover PhotoTeleport uses Qt 5.9 which is not available in all distributions, so if I have to bundle Qt with my package, I don't see many advantages over shipping an AppImage;
  • Snap: they require root permission to be installed, and the support for desktop applications is still incomplete;
  • FlatPak: there's no runtime for Qt applications (and no, I don't want to force users to install the whole KDE runtime!), and drag & drop is not supported yet.

That said, it's just a matter of making the best out of my little spare time. I can reach every Linux user with the AppImage format, so that's the first option I took. I'm certainly open to the idea of using also other formats in the future (I might make debs after Ubuntu 18.04 is released with Qt 5.9) and I'll happily accept any contribution that can make PhotoTeleport available in Snap, Flatpak or other formats. But I don't have the time pioneering that right now :-)

Comments

There's also webmention support.