Goyaka Labs have built a new service for exporting your photos from Flickr and importing them to Facebook. At the time of writing, the service is very new; it doesn’t even have a name (update: it’s now called UnifyPhotos). It does show promise though, as it is simple, quick, and makes sure to keep your privacy in mind: you can access it from export.goyaka.com/main.
The whole thing is a quick three-step process:
- Sign in into Facebook
- Sign in to Flickr
- Migrate photos
The tool, which was written with Ruby on Rails and is hosted on Amazon Web Services, leverages the Facebook and Flickr application programming interfaces (APIs) to do both the importing and exporting for you. That means you don’t have to save each photo from Flickr and upload it manually to Facebook. It creates a photo album in your Facebook account for every photo set in your Flickr account.
Furthermore, the photos are automatically put in your Facebook Timeline. By default, they are set so that only you can see them. Once the process is complete, you can choose which photos and albums you want to show your friends, or even display publicly.
Goyaka explains why the tool exists in the first place:
Why Facebook? Zuckerberg owns me already
Facebook photos are more social. Tagging just nails it.
Share with your schoolmates, family or no one.
Timeline! We love facebook’s timeline. Though it is still buggy.
Picasa and Flickr are dying. I don’t want to pay for my flickr pro account
I love snapjoy’s UI. But they don’t allow import from flickr. Also, social circle in Snapjoy is something I have to build. Facebook fits the bill.
The startup also promises not to spam your Facebook News Feed: “we do won’t share pigs and farm animals in your news feed” since “we just want you to enjoy your photos in one single place.”
The three Indian programmers behind the project haven’t shared much about each other yet, though they can be contacted via Twitter: @alagu, @haxplorer, and @suren. The last has also shared his Facebook profile publicly: Surendran Mahendiran. Alternatively, if you want to e-mail them, you can do so via this link: support@goyaka.com.
I have reached out to the trio and will see what else they have in the works. A Picasa to Facebook update is supposedly in the works, and at the very least I want to update you when that becomes available.
See also:
- How to get started with Facebook Timeline
- How Facebook got your phone number (and how to take it back)
- Google Chrome extension lets you bypass Facebook news apps
- Google Chrome extension lets you choose Facebook app permissions
- Facebook now lets you update Twitter
- Facebook: export your friends’ email addresses, if they let you
