Hi all,
Yesterday I released the Summitpost Bulk Uploader, a tool that I created over the last few weeks. It allows you to bulk upload photos to Summitpost. It's intended for Trip Report, Mountain, Route and Area page creators who have to upload several pictures.

Here is a screen shot, clicking on it takes you to a larger version:




I've tested it on Windows XP and Vista. I'd like to make a Mac version, but it will take a month or two before I can get around to it.

On the article page I have all documentation for the tool.

This is my way of saying thanks to Summitpost for being such a great service to the mountaineering community and introducing me to a lot of friends. I especially hope that our "Power Users" find the tool useful, and look forward to hearing criticisms, feature ideas, etc.

Please reply on the thread with your thoughts. You can also use the comments pane on the article page, which I'll look at often.

(edited for formatting...)

sjarelkwint wrote:Finally a way to upload my pictures ... Whitneypage here i come (and half dome, and sentinel dome and dana and manymany others ... ) Uploading one by one just sucked ...

You are exactly the person I was thinking about. Please let me know any issues, thanks sjarelkwint!

sjarelkwint wrote:Some comments:

- Not possible to reorder your pics
- Big files will last longer to upload, is there an option to auto-rescale them?
- I LOVE THIS!!!!

Thanks for testing it out, neither feature exists, but I added those suggestions to the features sub-page of the article.

Can you add a feature so that it doesn't bulk upload photos between midnight and 2:00 am?

Sorry to be a sourpuss, but do we really need to make it easier to upload pictures en mass to the Whitney and Half Dome pages?

Bob Burd wrote:Sorry to be a sourpuss, but do we really need to make it easier to upload pictures en mass to the Whitney and Half Dome pages?

Hi Bob, good point. Well, I am looking at the bright side: an easier photo upload will encourage the people out there who aren't already participating. I expect the great mass of them will be intelligent people who will be judicious about what they upload. And we'll all benefit from the additional content about mountains all over the world.

I hope people don't allow the greater ease-of-use in photo uploads to convince them to "dump" everything including the kitchen sink up here. But it is a powerful tool and sometimes it will be misused. Just as Summitpost is already misused by irrelevant images, spam, stolen text, etc.

I do run into people who would participate more, but the workload is too high. It's quite easy to create text, but picture uploads are too laborious for the year 2009. My opinion is that if we seek to limit the amount someone can contribute by keeping a process difficult then we slow the rate of adoption to that select few who have a high tolerance for pain (or possibly their own private bulk uploaders...there are a lot of programmers here!)

Naturally, I think Summitpost's existing guidelines about photos still apply: they should contain useful information about the climb or location, they should be subject-appropriate. Scenic beauty is much appreciated, but many nearly-duplicate shots of mediocre quality are deplored.

I've wished for this while constructing mountain pages, but there is a fly in the ointment: you still have to manually enter the title and caption. True, often all one needs for title and caption is within the mountain page itself. But I do fear that this might encourage people to put even less info on photos that are not for a specific page.

How about a little window that comes up when you press submit...like


"Are you sure all 15 photos with captions you are uploading meet the high quality bar exemplified by summitposts best images? (not the butterflies though)"

And you have to ponder that for 10 seconds? Hey maybe the amount of pondering required comes from your average picture voting score? If the score is low enough you have to write a 500 word essay about the image importance to be attached as the description.

(edited to add more jokes)

squishy wrote:

MoapaPk wrote:I've wished for this while constructing mountain pages, but there is a fly in the ointment: you still have to manually enter the title and caption. True, often all one needs for title and caption is within the mountain page itself. But I do fear that this might encourage people to put even less info on photos that are not for a specific page.

Every field in the add image form should be available, I bet he could add all of them to the uploader...

Actually I don't quite understand...the tool even requires you to enter a Title and Description (caption) for each image. MoapaPk, if you don't want to type that manually, where would you like it to be pulled from? Metadata in the JPG image itself?

mvs wrote:

squishy wrote:

MoapaPk wrote:I've wished for this while constructing mountain pages, but there is a fly in the ointment: you still have to manually enter the title and caption. True, often all one needs for title and caption is within the mountain page itself. But I do fear that this might encourage people to put even less info on photos that are not for a specific page.

Every field in the add image form should be available, I bet he could add all of them to the uploader...

Actually I don't quite understand...the tool even requires you to enter a Title and Description (caption) for each image. Squishy if you don't want to type that manually, where would you like it to be pulled from? Metadata in the JPG image itself?

Actually, I had deleted that message when I realized that you had the fields. Really I did; I don't know how it got posted.

Does it automatically return the list of numeric picture IDs, so you can insert them in an article?

MoapaPk wrote:

mvs wrote:

squishy wrote:

MoapaPk wrote:I've wished for this while constructing mountain pages, but there is a fly in the ointment: you still have to manually enter the title and caption. True, often all one needs for title and caption is within the mountain page itself. But I do fear that this might encourage people to put even less info on photos that are not for a specific page.

Every field in the add image form should be available, I bet he could add all of them to the uploader...

Actually I don't quite understand...the tool even requires you to enter a Title and Description (caption) for each image. Squishy if you don't want to type that manually, where would you like it to be pulled from? Metadata in the JPG image itself?

Actually, I had deleted that message when I realized that you had the fields. Really I did; I don't know how it got posted.

Does it automatically return the list of numeric picture IDs, so you can insert them in an article?

No but that would be fantastic, that is the very next feature!

Yes, I've been so focused on the tool and forgot about the entire workflow. To have a little text array of those image ids will make it easier to add to a page.

Another reason I think that's important is that I do want to encourage Mountain, Route, Area, Trip Report creation, rather than just disconnected images. That is the coolest feature idea I heard so far that directly helps this case. Thanks MoapaPk!

Have you got the original python code available for download? That way I won't have to wait for a Linux port (using a Visual Studio compiler? Ewww... ) Also I can remove the save-my-summitpost-password "feature", make the description box bigger, etc.
(I do like the fact that it auto-saves a lot of stuff, but I take passwords seriously. Saving the password should be optional.)

nartreb wrote:Have you got the original python code available for download? That way I won't have to wait for a Linux port (using a Visual Studio compiler? Ewww... ) Also I can remove the save-my-summitpost-password "feature", make the description box bigger, etc.
(I do like the fact that it auto-saves a lot of stuff, but I take passwords seriously. Saving the password should be optional.)

Haha, I understand your pain on imagining some kind of horrible Linux port from Visual Studio!

Well if I release it as open source I want to do it in an organized way, via a SourceForge project where we can share and validate checkins properly. Talking with some "elvish folk" I hear some worries about the power of this tool, thinking that people will try to overload the site with pornography or something like that. So as we hash all this out I won't go any further with more ways of distributing/porting yet.

Anyway, if I made a unix port I would write it on the Mac using the standard g++ compiler and X-windows...never fear!

Yes, interesting that you mention you don't like the password saving feature. I found it convenient, but then again I'm on a machine where 1) I'm an administrator and 2) nobody within 5 miles of me knows or cares what Summitpost is, so I felt safe. I'd be happy to make it optional.

New version released: 1.0.0.1. 6 bug fixes, 1 feature (bigger description box).

Follow the download link on the article page to get it.

Special thanks to my wife who tried it out and found a whopping 13 bugs! Nothing to crow about I guess!

Thanks for all the suggestions so far folks. They are all recorded on the page. Now I've gotta get some sleep.

Congratulations !
I used it to upload a dozen of pictures of Rozsutec, it works very fine.
Few remarks/suggestions (despite I don't really know if I use the latest version)
* I couldn't select the object to attach it to
* The description field is perhaps a bit too small with one line
* Enlarging the application should allow enlarging the description zone only and not all text fields on 1 line
* Why not allowing multiple-select on the file list to enter a common title/description for several pics in the same time ?
* A second tool (or check-box) to upload on MBPost ?
Well, this shouldn't hide the big quality of your program: simple and efficient... well made !
In which language have you made it ? Did you have to ask the Elves for permission ? Would it be possible to have the source code to "customize" it a bit ?
Thanks,
Eric