Export to Flickr Plugin for Lightroom

I’ve been using Jeffrey Friedl’s “Export to Flickr” Lightroom Plugin for about a month now, and I have to say that it’s a pretty solid plugin. My motive for finding an alternative to Flickr’s Uploadr was to automate my backup workflow – manually exporting all my RAW files to JPGs and then creating individual sets for everything would have been unnecessarily tedious, given that I had about four year’s worth of photos to backup.

My only complaint is with how the plugin handles errors. When something goes wrong, an error message pops up and the entire export process is aborted. While I can understand this when serious errors occur, I wish there was some sort of timeout-and-retry-before-aborting mechanism in place, especially in the case of not getting a response from Flickr, due to, say, your network connection going out temporarily. It’s a bit frustrating to leave Lightroom running overnight to backup several hundred photos, only to wake up in the morning and finding out that the export process aborted after the 10th image.

But again, a very solid plugin overall and I highly recommend it. And while it started as just a backup tool, I’ve begun to use it for publishing my public photos to Flickr as well. Based on subjective experience (I don’t plan to test for actual numbers), it seems as though Uploadr throttles the upload speed, with Jeffrey’s plugin pushing photos to Flickr at least three times faster, a speed boost which is more than welcome.