The Substantially Similar Weblog

Free software hack discovery of the day: Blinkflash, the unofficial winkflash commandline client.

Competition in the web-based photo printing business is heating up, and Winkflash is the best priced I’ve found so far. With an introductory coupon code, 4×6 prints are only 6 cents each; and normally they are 12 cents each, with $0.99 flat rate shipping. We just made our first order, so we’ll see how the quality is, but these days most of these services seem to provide comparable results.

The main problem is that the two bulk upload systems winkflash provides—a Java applet and an Internet Explorer “drag and drop” control—don’t work under GNU/Linux. So you’re stuck uploading photos one by one with a web form.

Enter Blinkflash—now you can upload your photos right from the command line, with Unix-ish efficiency. Blinkflash just submits the photos to the web form upload system, but it saves an awful lot of time.

Hopefully Winkflash doesn’t mind this program—it can only generate more revenue for them. I suppose they might have trademark concerns, but I don’t think that is fatal.

I think I’ll package it for Debian and make a few tweaks. For one thing, it only works with the UK version of Winkflash, but that can be fixed with an extra command line switch. Also, you have to enter your username and password on the command line—there should be a way to store that in a .rc file. But it’s in fairly legible python (isn’t all python code legible?), so I think I should be able to take care of these things quickly.

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