Up until last month, an average of 1 million photos were being downloaded with Bulkr every month, since December last year. I just checked the stats and turns out that 2+ million photos have been downloaded in the last two weeks (142,000 photos per day!). Exciting times indeed.

That makes a total of 7+ million total photo download since Bulkr came into existence 5 months ago. In case you didn’t know already, there is a counter on Bulkr’s homepage which shows the total number of photos downloaded.

Last month a new version of Bulkr was released. A new feature was added which allowed users to browse/download upto 500 photos in one batch. It’s probably because of this new feature, photo downloads have skyrocketed lately.

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who have used Bulkr. The feedback has been amazing and I’m now working even more actively to add new features. Some major changes are coming to Bulkr soon. Stay tuned!

P.S: If you would like to support Bulkr, do tell your friends. If you’d like to tweet about it, please click here. Or you can also fave it in the Flickr App Garden. Thanks!

Bulkr is a desktop application that allows you to backup or download photos from Flickr. Over 4 million photos have been downloaded using Bulkr in the past 4 months. Users have been frequently sending requests for features they would like to see in Bulkr. Some of those kept coming back and were the most wanted. And all of them have been incorporated in a new version of Bulkr. Here they are:

v0.30 beta:

• Download photo metadata (titles, tags, descriptions etc)
• File names up to 255 char are supported (previously only 50)
• Up to 500 photos can be downloaded in a batch
• Photos of Family/Friends can be downloaded
• Photos can be opened on Flickr right from the thumbnail view
• Thumbnails now load 50% faster!
• Copyright information is now more prominent (colored)
• Under-the-hood improvements
• Bug fixes
• UI tweaks

The feature to be able to download Photo metadata (title, tags etc) was the most requested feature. Right now these data are downloaded to a separate .txt file, but future versions will have more robust support.

Also now you can download upto 500 photo in a batch. The previous cap was 200. This was another popular request by people who had fast internet connections and wanted to download a lot of photos.

Here’s how to get the new version:

• If you have already installed Bulkr: When you open Bulkr next time you will be asked to update to the never version.
• If you are yet to install Bulkr: Head over to http://clipyourphotos.com/bulkr and hit the Install Now button and start downloding!

You do not even need a Flickr a/c to be able to download photos using Bulkr. Just install it and start searching from millions of photos. Want wallapapers? Want art? Want inspiration? Flickr has them all and with Bulkr it’s  just few clicks away from your desktop.

Check out the latest version of Bulkr: http://clipyourphotos.com/bulkr

Discover is a little section I started sometime ago, where I pick my favorite photographers and showcase them. Here’s another pick:

Featured Photographer: mr. Ingard Jensen (Aremac on Flickr)

Aremac was one of the first photographers I stumbled upon on Flickr. The colors in his photos was what attracted me. He has a knack for capturing the beauty in lots of unusual places. He is mostly known for his sets of fall and countryside photos. Many of his photos are always a little extra saturated, which many would consider not a good thing. But as you can see, the extra colors in his photos make the photos vibrant and lively.

(If photos are not visible below, please click here)

Flickr is arguably the best place to find the most awesome photos on the internet. Everyday around 3 million photos are uploaded to Flickr! Out of these millions of photos 500 of the most interesting are showcased on Explore.

As a photography enthusiast, I spend a lot of time on Flickr trying to find some of the most awesome photos. And over time I’ve come across some pretty amazing photos and artists. Discover is a section on this blog where I will post  3 awesome photos in each blog post, from some of my favorite photographers . I will try to do that post as frequent as possible.

So, to start off with here are 3 photos from one of my most favorite photographer – Stuck in Customs. Clicking on any photo will take you to the photo on Flickr where you can comment/face the photo. The Discover this photographer link at the end will take you to the most interesting photos of the photographer.

I’ve reached the end of the world

Farewell India – The Taj Mahal

A Perfect Morning at Glacier National Park

Hope you find this useful. And as always, comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Every year different popular websites have their share of fun on April 1st. Some of the most notable ones being from Google. Don’t believe me? Check out Google Romance! It’s just one of dozens of April fools pranks they play every year.

This year’s April 1st was even more interesting because even Flickr played a small joke!

Above are photos which were on Explore Front Page on April 1st 2010. Many of the photos were of Pandas and Rainbows.

Huh!?

So, what’s so special about China’s national animal and rainbows, you may ask? We all know Explore is where Flickr showcases 500 most interesting photos for any given day. But did you know, Explore photos are selected from the set of photos vomited by a Panda! No, really! Check out the vomiting in action here: http://flickr.com/explore/panda.

Maybe Flickr thought it was time to give the vomiting giant a break and feature it on Explore. And what better day to do that than on April 1st?

Now, not everyone was thrilled by this though. I got a mail from a Flickr member asking me if featuring only black and white animals on Explore was a joke, and that she was not laughing. Well too bad for her, but hey let’s all see the humor in it. After all the world will get back to normal tomorrow

Few other pranks (by Google):

• Google changes it’s company name to Topeka!
• Pigeonrank: The technology behind Google’s great results
• Introducing Google Translate for animals

It’s been about 10 days since the last tool - Ripples was released. Thanks everyone for sending in your comments and suggestions.

If you haven’t noticed already, a new toy has been up on the site for few days. It’s called Motivate Me. It can be used to create your own personalized motivational posters. Not sure what a motivational poster is? Well here’s an example:

A motivational poster (or inspirational poster) is a type of poster commonly designed for use in schools and offices. The intent of motivational posters is to make people think differently about the things that they may be learning or doing.

So you take a picture, add a witty title and description to make the viewer think twice by relaying a sarcastic or humorous message.

Our new tool makes it a breeze to create your own customized motivational posters. You get options to change the font, color and style of the text on screen. All changes are reflected in real time, which is a fancy way of saying that everything is fast!

If you’re not sure what to create, there’s a lot of inspiration on Google Images.

There are tons of motivational and de-motivational posters out there. Now you have the power to create your own! Check it out: http://clipyourphotos.com/motivate

One of the reasons I started ClipYourPhotos is because it is my mission to make it very easy for anyone to do really cool stuff with their photos with just few clicks.

That got me thinking for a while as to what works and what doesn’t in the site. And so far, simplicity has worked well on ClipYourPhotos. Framer is used by thousands everyday, and I believe that’s because it is so very simple to use. Same goes for Bulkr and other tools. So I thought of doing a small experiment and quickly putting an easy to use one-purpose tool. The experiment is to see how a single purpose tool works out on the site. And based on the result, more similar tools will be added later.

That is how Ripples Maker was born.

It’s a no frills tool that adds rippled reflections to your photos.. instantly!

It doesn’t have too many feature and using it is pretty straightforward. I’m pretty happy with the results since it was a quick project (2 days). Here’s what the tool can do:

Ripples Maker is up on the site and you can start creating stuff right away at: http://clipyourphotos.com/ripples

Your comments or suggestions to make this or any other tool better are always so very welcome!

Apparently all the links in my previous post were broken. It happened due to a small negligence on my side. I’m writing this post just to reach out the email subscribers. Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

You can click this link to check out Face Bender V2. This time the link works

-Prakaz

It’s been a while since the last blog post. I’ve been working on improving the ClipYourPhotos framework so that it’s more extensible and future tools and toys will have visual and other consistency.

Face Bender was added to the site about a month back and I’ve been getting lots of comments from users. Thank you all for sending them across. It helps me to understand what users want and how the tools can be improved.

Today, a new version of Face Bender is out on the site. This version is much simpler to use and has many more effects than before. Now you have more ways to make fun of your friends’ photos Take it for a spin and please let me know what you think so that it can be improved.

Check out the new version and have a good laugh – Face Bender V2.

Your comments/suggestions are always welcome.

It’s been a month and half since Bulkr was released and I’m delighted to say that it has been already used to download more than 1 million photos (1,004,530 as of this writing) from Flickr! Thank you everyone for using the app and for your feedback/comments. I wanna share a small story on how Bulkr came into existence and how an app I created for myself has been used by thousands to download more than a million Flickr photos in a short time.

How it all started…

Bulkr started with a problem – somewhere in mid November last year I wanted to copy all my Flickr photos to Facebook. After struggling with few apps it occurred to me that there really wasn’t a decent tool to backup Flickr photos on Mac. So, in a few days I created a small prototype app which could download everything from my Flickr account to the computer. It was called PhotoGettr then. Here are some screenshots tweeted during it’s development:

• Initial idea on paper
• The first working version (it didn’t even have a download button!)
• During development

PhotoGettr was not really on my project list for ClipYourPhotos. I created it just because I needed it then. The first version was named Bulkr and it was up on ClipYourPhotos on 6th Dec, 2009. Only after it was featured on MakeUseOf.com few days later, I realized how useful this was to others too. Bulkr was mentioned in dozens of other blogs and the snowball effect started.

Bulkr had a great month. Many people sent in comments and suggestions. Being on Flickr App Garden also helped. But soon it became clear that some Flickr members found Bulkr upsetting. The idea that anyone could have access to their photos so easily was appalling to them. Few emailed and said that they would complain about this to Flickr. I replied assuring major changes would come in the next version of Bulkr and thanked them for their feedback.

And then the party stopped…

On 5th Jan, (while eating breakfast) I got a mail from Flickr with the subject “Flickr Appgarden Violation”. And that kind of subject is never a good sign . Apparently, Flickr had been getting complaints about Bulkr. They reviewed the app and found out that any Flickr user’s large size photo could be downloaded using the “Browse User” button. During development I thought that this would be a cool feature and ignorantly included it, forgetting Flickr’s privacy settings. It was relatively a small bug. But it proved to be fatal.

My bad. The app’s API key was disabled by Flickr immediately. Which is a fancy way of saying Bulkr was no more functional!

I stopped eating breakfast and got to work right away. And in 2 days a new version of Bulkr was ready. It had all the changes that Flickr users wanted. I discussed the changes with the nice folks at Flickr and everything was well. The API key was enabled and Bulkr was back from the dead.

The downloads resumed…

Since Flickr re-enabled the API key, the downloads have resumed and every day Bulkr is used to download literally thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of photos everyday. It has been an awesome learning experience for me. My sincere thanks to everyone who used the app and sent me feedbacks/comments – which really helped to make the app better. Also kudos to the Flickr dev team for creating a fine API framework and to Chris from Flickr, who helped me steer Bulkr in the right direction.

And thank you for reading. I did not intend this post to be so long, but since you have reached here, I guess, you don’t mind

What next?

More features will be added to Bulkr. Perhaps it should also have an uploader? Or something else…? Your suggestions are always welcome. You can keep up with developement and other bits happening at ClipYourPhotos on Twitter.

If you like Bulkr, please add it as a fav in the Flickr App Garden. It’s good karma