Missives from the 6th Floor

Bibble has turned out to be the best RAW to JPG converter I've found - but I'm having trouble with the idea of spending $80 on the "light" version, knowing that I'll seriously under-utilize it for the forseeable future. I don't love the UI, but it's functional, and while I suspect I could get comparable results out of RawStudio, the Bibble learning curve was way better.

Once I had JPGs, I needed to find a tool to upload them to Flickr - which was sort of the point of converting the files in the first place. I tried postr, and found it was missing any ability to resize before/during upload - adding another step to the workflow (which I could certainly do with Bibble, but I don't want to resize the data during conversion - I want to upload small JPGs).

So I tried kFlickr and found it capable, but not as feature-rich as I'd like. In particular, it lacks the ability to create sets (though it can associate files being uploaded with existing sets), and it's resize doesn't handle batches of mixed aspect ratio files well.

I even gave both the stable and alpha versions of jUploader a whirl, but it couldn't process the JPGs Bibble was producing. Since it had the features I wanted, I persevered and discovered that it was the preview thumbnail embedded in the EXIF data that was giving jUploader heart burn, and used exiftool to strip that field (and filed a bug against jUploader). Unfortunately that was just the beginning of my trouble with jUploader. Something about the way it manages memory during image resize causes both the java VM process and the X Server process to consume memory like it's going out of style. Processing a batch of more than 15 or so images is impossible on my machine with 4GB of RAM. Despite this, the resize and set management features convinced me to "give it one more try," but I ultimately gave up when it threw random upload errors on certain files - files which KFlickr resized and uploaded without complaint.

So at the moment, my process is (1) take pictures, (2) import said pictures into F-Spot, (3) tag those I want to upload to flickr, (4) export the tagged raw files to a folder, (5) point Bibble at the raw files and go have coffee/tea/dinner, (6) point KFlickr at the resulting JPGs for upload and go have more coffee/tea/dinner, (7) head to flickr in a browser, create sets as appropriate, organize photos into them.

This is clearly way too much work.

Calgon, take me away!