Introducing the Starry Hope Uploader for Facebook

Published on January 15, 2011, by Jim Mendenhall
Tags: Linux,  Ubuntu 

Over the last few years, I’ve often been frustrated by the way that every new iteration of the web-based Facebook photo uploader never seems to work right with Ubuntu. Even more annoying is the fact that Facebook’s ever-changing API often leads to many Ubuntu based tools for uploading photos being broken. With the introduction of Facebook’s Graph API and Ubuntu’s Quickly project, it seemed like building a Facebook photo uploader should be pretty easy.

I decided to spend some time over the holiday season to learn enough Python and PyGTK to write a simple uploader that I could share with the open source community. Starry Hope Uploader 0.1 is the result of that work.

Starry Hope Uploader allows you to batch upload photos to Facebook by simply dragging them unto the uploader, choosing an album and clicking the upload button. It’s designed to be super simple and to follow the old UNIX philosophy “do one thing and do it well.” Currently, you can also choose to upload high-resolution or standard photos and create new albums. Look for a few more features in future releases.

While I learned quite a lot in the process, I’m still far from being a great Python programmer, and this project is far from being complete (although it’s quite usable). I hope that some more experienced developers will lend a hand with cleaning up my code and adding new features. Most of all, I hope that this simple Facebook photo uploader will be useful to the Ubuntu community.

The source code can be found on launchpad. I’ve also created a PPA for the project.

To install the Starry Hope Uploader, copy and paste the following lines into a Terminal window.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jimjimovich/starry-hope-uploader
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install starry-hope-uploader

Please feel free to try out the uploader and report any bugs if you find them. Enjoy!