Desktop Flickr Organizer - Makes Flickr Easy for Linux Users

If you like digital photography, there's a pretty good chance you use an online image-sharing website to display your work. Flickr is among the most popular of those sites, and one reason is likely because it has an open API that allows desktop clients to interact with it. This means that browser plugins, Java applications... anything that adheres to the Flickr standard can be used as an upload manager.

One of the best Flickr clients I've seen is for Linux, and it's called the Desktop Flickr Organizer. In addition to acting as a typical uploader, the Desktop Flickr Organizer allows Linux users to search through their Flickr images, edit an image's Title, Description and Tags, change its visibility, license, create new sets of images, and even act as an image downloader!

If you have a large number of images on Flickr (or even a small number), you likely use the tags feature to help organize and group your images. Tags are a great way to do this, since - unlike putting individual images into discreet groups (akin to Folders on the desktop) - tags are much more flexible. Multiple tags can be assigned to a single image, which means images can be a part of many different groups. For instance, if you have a great outdoor wallpaper image showing a close-up of a green leaf, you could tag that image with the following tags: Nature, Wallpaper, Green

From then on, if you perform a search for that tag, or in the case of the Desktop Flickr Organizer, simply browse your tags alphabetically, that image will show up in all three of those tags, along with any other images you had given one of those tags to as well.

What if you realize one of your images is improperly tagged? No biggie. Just find that image as its grouped with the rest of the images you'd given that tag to, and drag it to the bottom of the Desktop Flickr Organizer window, where you'll see a rectangular beige box. Dragging an image here removes that tag. Brilliant!

As mentioned earlier, the Desktop Flickr Organizer can also be used as a photo downloader. This is a fantastic tool, as it can be a bit of a pain to download images from the Flickr website. First you need to find the image you want, then you need to see it in all sizes, and then finally you click the Download link. Then you have to do that for every photo you want to download!

With the Desktop Flickr Organizer, downloading your Flickr images is easy. Simply highlight each photo you want to download, then click the Download button in the Desktop Flickr Organizer toolbar. Since the Desktop Flickr Organizer works in offline mode, you won't start downloading photos immediately, but when you're done, go ahead and either hit the Connect link in the Flickr menu, or the Sync Now option in the lower toolbar. Any changes you've made - such as editing tags, group creation, or upload/download queues - will all be performed at this time. You can watch the progress of uploads or downloads, but you'd better get there fast, because in my use, the Desktop Flickr Organizer does things pretty quickly.

All in All, the Desktop Flickr Organizer is one of the best Flickr clients I've ever used. It's simple to use, has a nice, intuitive interface, works the way I think it should work (always a plus!), and has a lot of features that just make sense to me. If you'd like to try out the Desktop Flickr Organizer, head on over to its website to take a look. Or, if you use Ubuntu, you can simply "sudo apt-get install dfo" and it will be installed, along with all its dependencies. No matter how you get it, the Desktop Flickr Organizer will change how you deal with Flickr.