I upload all my Flickr photos using Flickr Uploadr for the Mac v3.2.1. Things had been working fine until two days ago. On September 18th, Flickr Uploadr crashed upon launch. Every time I tried to launch it, it would crash within five seconds. I use Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4. I am pretty sure that it wasn't the software update that broke it, but something else.
I tried all the usual "software first-aid". Delete preferences, caches, application support settings. Re-install the application. Nothing worked. In fact, Flickr Uploadr would crash even before it signed into Flickr!
I wasted almost 12 hours over a period of two days trying to figure out how to fix things. Flickr Uploadr is Flickr's recommended desktop uploader of choice. However, they haven't updated the tool since June 2009. The only documentation that exists is in form of users pouring their woes out on Flickr forums. I loathe forums. One has to sift through piles of clueless rubbish to actually figure out what the proper issue is. And then, there's a 5% chance that the forum will have a proper solution in it.
Here is a forum thread where other users have complained about the same problem.
Flickr staff have washed their hands off the project with the following statement:
The desktop Uploadr is not in active development at this time, so it might be best to try one of the 3rd party applications in the App Garden if you would prefer to use a desktop client rather than our web uploadersI decided to look under the hood and try to fix things myself. After some debugging, I realised that the component at fault was XULrunner - a framework upon which Flickr Uploadr is built. I then replaced the XULrunner framework with the latest version (v1.9.2 as of this writing).
And to help out Mac users in the Flickr community who are heavily dependent upon Flickr Uploadr, I have created a ZIP file of my "stabililzed" Flickr Uploadr which can be downloaded from:
http://saumil.net/howto/flickruploadr/Flickr_Uploadr_saumil19092010.zip
Unzip the file and copy the Flickr Uploadr App into your Applications Folder. Hopefully, it should work. Note - this application has only been tested on my Mac (Mac OS X 10.6.4 - Intel). I would appreciate it if you can confirm whether this works or not.
