Flickrfs on Ubuntu

Flickrfs got blogged at Ubuntu: http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2005/11/08/using-flickrfs-on-ubuntu/

The blog contains the directions for how to install flickrfs on Ubuntu, along with bugs/feature requests. I checked them out as follows, and here are the replies:

Uploading:

"I tried creating a new Set and uploading new photos that belonged to this set using the method mentioned by the author. Only the first photo I copied got saved to the set, all the other were not included as a part of the set, but were uploaded with the right tags just fine."
Fixed in v1.1


Browsing:
"Out of 4 Sets that I have in Flickr, only two showed up locally. Dunno why."

Fixed in v1.1
 
Downloading:
"I tried to browse through the photos with the tags “background” and “wallpaper” - some of the files that were in the /media/tags/public/background:wallpaper were clearly not image files (eg: a file named “08 03PV 16 11 32″, and I had to wait forever to be able to see the images. Some files were .jpg files, and some had no extension, but from the filename, I suppose they were image files. Also, without seeing the image, how do you know how good it is? So, one does have to wait for Flickr to return the photos. Pretty slow, even over avery fast connection."

 Well, the fs implementation is not meant for image browsing, and is neither optimized for that. There is no caching involved, so as to keep the memory usage to minimum. Regarding the download speed, it is because the image being downloaded by flickrfs is maximum size (large), while the photos downloaded during browsing are lower resolution, thus less download size.
The idea is to search for photos using tags etc. and then do a 'cp * ~/lemmecheck', while the photos are downloaded, you keep doing something else.
The photos are named as per the title of photos. This may or may not contain the extension of the originally uploaded photo.


Complaint
"All the commands seem to be executed as the root user. FUSE is a user-space filesystem tool, and I should think that flickrfs should make it possible for normal users to browse pictures. Having to be “root” to see the pictures and upload them leads to some inconvenience. "

Currently, there is some problem with fuse while trying to mount the fs as normal user. However, I have kept it on the list of 'To-Do's and, will surely be providing a normal-user mountable flickrfs at some point of time.


In case, you are looking for some error not listed here, or anywhere else in documentation, please subscribe to the mailing list at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flickrfs-users and post it online.