How I Upload Photos to Facebook: Automated Bulk Image Resizing and Adding Copyright Notices

April 13, 2010 | By Rakhitha | Filed in: Me, Myself & I, Sri Lanka, Tech.

If you are using a super fast internet connection. And you have plenty of time to add copyright notices to photos one at a time, this post is not for you.

I am using a crappy internet connection. I also find that java based face book photo uploader takes a long time compared to the amount of data it has to upload. And it often fails. If I use HTML based uploader, it takes a lone time to upload everything, five photos at a time. It often mess things up if you try to do parallel uploads (like giving you a log-in page instead of uploading stuff). Picasa uploader might be a good idea but Google finally made Picasa way to complicated to do simple things. It used to be simple. This post is about a simple tool that I created to make my life easy when uploading photos to Facebook.

Once we upload photos to Facebook it re-size them anyway. Resizing before uploading can be very useful when you are on a slow link. After resizing you may also want to add copyright notice to some of the images before uploading. If you do this one image at a time, it will take a long time. Resizing and adding copyright notice is something you can easily automate. And that’s what I did.

I wrote this java program to read in all the images in a specified directory, do re-size based on specified widths and heights while keeping aspect ratio, and then add copyright notice. It’s not a perfect product. It has few glitches. It does not produce perfect quality jpg files. But most of the times, it’s good enough for the job of preparing images for Facebook albums.

After resizing the images, they are often small enough to mail using the Facebook mobile upload feature. If I have a large number of photos to send I use parallel mail sender that I posted about sometimes back.

If you are interested, I uploaded the software to google code hosting. Here is the link. Both source and compiled class files are included in a single zip file with a cmd file to run it. There is a ‘read me’ file inside the zip file. It has all the instructions you need to run it. You will need java 1.6 to run it. I have hard-coded the application to process only jpg files. Because that’s the format most of the digital cameras produce. This can easily be changed to work with the any other image formats. Also I have hard-coded the output format to be jpg. That can also be changed easily. For example, if you want loss-less compression you might want to use png output format instead of jpg.

Hope you will find this useful. Please let me know your comments and feedback.

/Rakhitha

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