Uploading from Photos to Flickr (the quest continues...)

Hi,

This is, by far, not a new question, but a quite old one, that gets asked over and over again, and, with the years, it is always answered differently.

So, how do you upload/share directly from Photos to your Flickr account?

The short answer is you don't. Every integration that ever existed between Apple's photo gallery (the actual application name has been changing over the decades) and direct upload/sharing to Flickr is currently unsupported.

Flickr still offers the well-known Flickr Uploadr tool, but it's now only available for Flickr Pro users. Old versions don't work any longer on Catalina and later versions. Even the latest version does not say that it works with Photos; instead, it only mentions compatibility with iPhoto.

So, if you're both a Flickr & Photos user, you're stuck without a way to interconnect both.

In earlier versions, all you needed to do was to add a Flickr account under System Preferences » Internet Accounts, and macOS would add all required integrations with iPhoto, namely, install the required shared extensions in order to get any (image) file to be shared with Flickr.

This is currently not an option, and AFAIK, there is no available Flickr share extension such as described by:

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/extensions/share-extensions/

On the other hand, the documentation for developing such an extension is from late 2017:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/General/Conceptual/ExtensibilityPG/Share.html

Flickr could give a hand in this, but they gave up, mostly because Apple is not fond of releasing internal API documentation for their very-closed-source applications. The number of software developers that create add-ons that work as extensions to Apple native applications is therefore very small (possibly with the sole exception of Safari, which was designed to be extendable by third parties). Flickr commented here and there that they would not spend an eternity delving into the complexities of the Photo database structure so that it could extract photos from it — only to have all the work thrown into the Bin because, on subsequent macOS upgrades, the database format changed again.

There is currently a workaround to the lack of Flickr support. When using the web-based Flickr uploader, instead of dropping and dragging folder from the Finder into the Web page, choose the small Add button (top left corner). This will bring up the dialogue box for uploading file(s) from your Mac to Flickr. And on that box you will have a pair of new icons, for 'Photos' and 'Media', respectively. These give access to the Photos library (!), from where you can select individual photos for upload.

This works — to a degree. You just get access to your full Library, or filter by person/tag. You do not get access to any of the albums you have set up on the Photos library. Also, and more importantly. you cannot upload HEIC files. So, if that's the only format you've got, you're stuck. Flickr does not even recognise HEIC as a valid import file type!

If you have figured out a way to open the whole list of albums, as well, please let me know...