Windows LiveWriter prevails over Firefox for easy image uploads
I have been looking around for a solution for quite some time, that would allow me to quickly add pictures to my online posts… now I can. Instead of having to manually resize, upload, and link each image that I want to include, like the one below that I took on my upstairs balcony one night while hanging out with Alex and Toaster, I can just drag and drop it into the post. As long as I’m using Windows Live Writer to post to my blog, this isn’t a problem; the text formatting, and other option of Live Writer are also quite impressive. The program resizes the image for you, to the size that you specify, and gives you the option to add a link to a larger version.
What I find most cool about this is that it works independently of photo hosting sites like photobucket or imageshack. In fact, automatically uploads the auto-generated image files via the blog’s API, in this case wordpress. I like this a lot better, because I like hosting my own images. After all, I’ve been in the hosting business before, and I have ample space to do this. I also don’t like being dependent on third-party services. I like having control over the content that I publish. I also like the flexibility to be able to later on change the scheme to something else, let’s say, for instance, integration with the Gallery2 application.
I was disappointed to see that I could not find a plugin for Firefox that was suitable for doing all this by simply dragging them into a textarea. Yes, I’m THAT lazy, but it’s really convenient: definetely try Windows Live Writer, even if you don’t post pictures often. The only plugin I found for Firefox that could do this is the ImageShack toolbar, which does exactly what I want (i.e. drag an image from your hard drive directly into the post in your web browser, and have the plugin auto-insert the link to the image, incl. thumbnail, as the file is uploaded from your computer to imageshack (after resizing on the client). Yes, it’s very, very cool, but in god’s name, I cannot find a plugin that does this for my own site, not just imageshack. I like it so much that I might even go so far as to hack the plugin for my own purposes… I don’t think it’s open source… hmm, any ideas?
Link to Uploadr for Flickr | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
