The latest news

As I wrote in the previous blog post the VK upload has been in a non-working state for some time. It happened that VK changed some of their APIs in a way that caused PhotoTeleport login to fail.

Luckily adapting the code for the new APIs was not such a big effort, so it was a matter of hours to update the code and deliver a new version to you. And I even managed to squeeze in some more changes! So, here’s what changed since version 0.14:

• VK upload works again.
• Fixed an issue where upload metadata was lost when restoring the last upload session.
• Remove the “Category” selection from the DeviantArt uploader (they removed the categories from their APIs)

I also gave it a try to the other uploaders, and as far as I could tell they are all working; but if you notice some issues, please don’t hesitate to report them in the bug tracker. Get PhotoTeleport 0.15 here!

Happy uploading! 😊

Sometime during last year Shutterstock switched its photo upload protocol from plain FTP to FTPS, a more secure version where all data exchange occurs over an encrypted connection. For most users this was not a big change, since FTPS is a rather old protocol which is supported by most FTP clients. PhotoTeleport, however, uses a basic FTP library that only supported unencrypted data transfers.

After some days of work, I could implement the FTPS support into the QtFtp library, and ultimately into PhotoTeleport itself. So, it’s with great joy that I announce that PhotoTeleport 0.14 has been released and supports uploading to Shutterstock again.

Unfortunately in the last couple of years I’ve not been active in photography apart from family and holidays, that’s why I haven’t been using PhotoTeleport myself and I didn’t notice that some services were not working. Another instance is VK (Vkontakte), which is now requiring clients to use a newer version of its APIs than what PhotoTeleport supports. I’ll try to find some time to fix it, so expect another release in the next few days.

But meanwhile, enjoy uploading to Shutterstock! Download PhotoTeleport 0.14, and don’t forget to report bugs!

Happy uploading! 😊

One of the very first things that PhotoTeleport users try to do when learning to use the program is dragging a folder onto it, with the expectation that PhotoTeleport would be smart enough to scan its contents and open all the images located in there. Unfortunately, this feature was never implemented – well, until now, at least!

With version 0.13, released today, PhotoTeleport will recursively scan the folders you drop onto its window and add all the image files to the upload queue. Please note that currently the tree structure is flattened, meaning that the directory information is not preserved, except by the FTP/SCP upload plugin, which will correctly recreate the folder structure if asked to:

The idea for a future release is, indeed, preserve the folder information for other plugins too, for example creating albums named after the file folder; this is not, however, a feature that I strongly need myself, so please consider giving a boost to its development, if you wish to make it happen soon.

Other changes in PhotoTeleport 0.13 include:

• Change Google Photos authentication to use the system browser (this change actually hurts usability, but it’s the only way Google will allow desktop applications to use its services, alas)
• Improve performance when handling large amount of photos
• FTP: make sure we preserve original file name when uploading after scaling

As usual, you can download it straight from the homepage, and don’t forget to report bugs!

Happy uploading! 😊

While working on integrating PhotoTeleport with Imaginario (so that one could select a few files from the latter and have the former upload them online), I realized that PhotoTeleport was not registered at all as a photo handler in MacOS.

Well, that’s something that had to be fixed!

And here comes PhotoTeleport 0.12, bringing you the following:

• MacOS: add PhotoTeleport as a image handler in the “Open with” menu
• Enable the “Retry” button in the authentication page
• Show the busy indicator while authenticating
• Allow the user to proceed to the next page if a plugin fails to login but then the corresponding service gets disabled

The last three points apply to all supported platforms (Linux, MacOC and Windows) and, while not bringing a big benefit for the successful upload scenario, can be of some relief when something goes wrong with the authentication of a target service, because they make the authentication process more robust.

There are still so many things that can possibly go wrong while authenticating against a website, that it should not happen as a surprise if an application does not properly handle a specific failure. So, should you experience some, don’t hesitate to report a bug.

But enough with reading, it’s time to go back to the homepage and download the latest version! 😊

Ah, Facebook! It’s a never-ending stream of changes to their authentication protocol, which loves deviating from the standard OAuth 2.0 specification in the most unpredictable ways!

Anyway, the good news is that I’ve just released PhotoTeleport 0.11, which should fix a recent issue with the Facebook authentication not working: I won’t bother you with the technical details, but it suffices to say that they don’t even follow their own documentation (and for the technical ones: FB silently changed their callback URL to https://web.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html — note: it’s web, not www!).

There are no other changes in this release, so, unless you are publishing to Facebook, there’s really no need for you to download this!

Here come some good news and an important notice. Let’s start with the good news: PhotoTeleport 0.10 has been released!

New in this version:

• Rewritten the Google Photos plugin to support the latest API
• Add a menu item for checking for updates
• Linux: fix parameter handling in .desktop file

The newly added update checker allows you to check for PhotoTeleport updates without having to visit the website (which you probably don’t do anyway, given that we have RSS for these things); it doesn’t actually download anything by itself, but it will show you a link from where you can get the new version.

The other big change is the almost complete rewrite of the Google Photos plugin, and here I need to raise your attention on one point: if something in PhotoTeleport does not work, please let me know: do not assume that other people are going to do this, or that the problem affects only your installation. While I reserve the right to respond with “it works on my computer!”, it’s very unlikely that the issue affects you only. And you should not assume that every single release of PhotoTeleport is tested against all bugs: I just do a quick smoke testing before every release, but there are some upload plugins that I almost never use (Google Photos being one of those) and are therefore less tested.

Google Photos was in fact completely broken, since Google shut down the old PicasaWeb API; luckily a user alerted me, so I could fix it for everybody else too, but it’s very likely that the issue has been met (with frustration) by some other users before him. So, for the future, keep this in mind and don’t be shy!

Exciting news for users of Imgur and SmugMug!

Finally PhotoTeleport can upload photos to Imgur and SmugMug, two popular services that could not miss from our long list of supported image sharing sites!

It should be noted that while we plan to always improve by supporting more options for each site, these two new upload plugins already support some features which will be greatly appreciated by our users: uploading to custom folders and galleries, which can also be created from PhotoTeleport itself.

Other changes in this version:

• Improve handling of failed uploads
• Flickr: sort albums alphabetically
• FTP: write metadata into files
• Shutterstock: upload tags
• Read list of services from command line
• Linux: improve .desktop file (auto-install, add MIME-types)

If you want to support PhotoTeleport’s development, please consider downloading it from the Apple store or from the Windows store (Windows 10 and newer only); or – even better – get it for free from the home page (Windows 8.0 and later, OS X, and most Linux distributions) and find your way in the Help menu to the donation links. Or just enjoy it as a New Year present from me. :-)

P.S.: As always, I’m waiting for your feedback and bug reports!

We are delighted to announce that PhotoTeleport is finally available for purchase in the Microsoft Store!

And the question remains the same: Why would you care, when you can download it for free from this website?

Same question, same answer: because you love PhotoTeleport and are happy if more people sponsor its development. Being able to get some income out of PhotoTeleport is a huge encouragement to continue improving it; also, these big corporate stores offer visibility to the products they sell, and this can mean enlarging the user base: more users, in turn, means more feature requests! And even though not all the new users will buy PhotoTeleport or support it with a donation (did you know you can? Just have a look at the “About” menu at the top left of the application), some will, and even if the income will never be enough for a developer to work on PhotoTeleport full-time, they make up a strong enough motivation to spend one’s free time on it.

Since version 0.6 already, the windows version of PhotoTeleport is available for download from the Softpedia archive; we found no compelling reason to announce this here, since you can already get the very latest version of PhotoTeleport from phototeleport.com. It also got a nice review, which hopefully will get updated to list the new stock photography sites we support uploading to, which were added just a couple of weeks ago.

This is a good opportunity to remind you that PhotoTeleport is not only free to download, but it’s also open source: anyone can contribute new features, fix bugs (provided that there are any! 😉), and redistribute it.

Our stock photographers will be happy to know that PhotoTeleport 0.8 is here!

This brings you two more plugins, to upload your photos to ShutterStock and DepositPhotos. If you happen to shoot for stock photography, you’ll know what these sites are. :-)

Other changes:

• Flickr: don’t hang when Flickr server replies with an error, but continue uploading
• FTP: improve login dialog
• Don’t show option page if none of the selected plugins support setting options
• Sort uploaders alphabetically
• Upon upload completion, fix the misleading message in the FTP plugin.

You can get PhotoTeleport 0.8 from the home page; meanwhile I will keep waiting for your bug reports!