Flickr AutoDownloadr

Flickr is, in its own words, almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. I'm not going to disagree with that. Flickr has a huge community of photographers, and there are some really great photos there for the world to see. (Plus mine, of course.) However, it seems a bit restricting to only be able to view photos in a web browser. It would be much better if you could view someone's online photo collection using the whole of your screen. Well - now you can.

Flickr AutoDownloadr is a small, freeware Windows application written using the Flickr API and AutoIt. Using it, you can pick any photos from Flickr - yours, your friends', random strangers' - and create a slideshow from them, which displays in a fullscreen window.

Features include:

• View pretty much any collection of photos - groups, sets, favourites, or the whole Flickr community
• Filter by tags, title, description or date
• Fullscreen view shows photo title & description, Flickr tags and EXIF tags
• 'Tag walk' mode to take a random journey through Flickr
• Run a slideshow straight from your Web browser with one click
• Option to run fullscreen, or in a window

Download Flickr AutoDownloadr version 1.14 (31 October 2007, 2.1Mb)

I've been working very sporadically on a beta version of the next release. If you'd like to try it out, here's the link. Please be warned that this is a beta version and may not function as expected. Having said that, I'd like some feedback if you find any new bugs in it, or find (miraculously!) that I've managed to fix some of the old ones.

You could use this program just to seek out some interesting new photos on Flickr, or perhaps you want to be able to show off your own photos on a Media Centre PC (or a laptop) connected to a TV. Or maybe you're building a digital picture frame...

Documentation is included in the download, but if you have any problems with the program, or if you want to suggest a new feature, please contact me: click for email address. Or you can IM me via meebo, below:

Quotes

Matt Brocchini: "Your application has revolutionized the way I experience my pictures. It is absolutely the key element that was missing from Flickr."

Crazy Day: "I have been looking for months for an app that does what Autodownloadr does, but nothing else is as feature-rich, stable, or well considered. You have created a useful and well-designed application that is an asset to the Flickr community."

Featured on Lifehacker on 18 April 2006.

Ben Shepherd

St Helens, UK