A cross-platform desktop application for Windows, Mac and Linux to download (all or selected) photos from your photostream in their original size along with their description, title and tags.

The previous entry on this blog discussed the idea of probably creating a native, Cocoa, Mac OS X port for the then, Windows-only, WPF version of the app.

Any action started much later from the date of the post; to be precise, more than two months later with the creation of a new repository with this commit. The research that happened in-between helped decide on a third alternative - that of completely porting over the .NET C#/WPF into a Mono, C#/GTK# app that could work on all of Windows, Mac and Linux.

And exactly after two months and one day the v1.0 of the new GTKSharp enabled flickr downloadr was published on this website.

It really was an exhilarating journey of many frustrations, joy, learnings and moments of bliss - and there are a few things that I would like to follow up in separate entries here. Like:

  1. the parallel, multi-platform continuous integration/deployment that happens on AppVeyor (Windows), Travis CI (Mac) and Wercker (Linux).
  2. the building of a cross-platform installer using the free-for-open-source Enterprise edition of Install Builder provided generously by the awesome guys at BitRock.
  3. the slight face-lift applied on the website along with the cut-over to a new, Yeoman scaffolded web-app - complete with its automated grunt build for minification, image compression etc. (do a quick View Source on this page to see the results)

…and many other such learnings and experiences.

So, please spread the word of this new, free, open-source utility for batch downloading photos from flickr that is available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (Ubuntu & Mint have been tested).

Comments