Lightroom 3 has stopped uploading to flickr

Question

Hi, I have recently started using Adobe Lightroom 3 to upload my images to flickr and it has been working OK for a couple of week but now keeps returning error messages which are either that it failed to establish a connection to Flickr and I should check my internet settings or that the file I am uploading is too large and I should try something smaller. My connection is fine and the image sizes have not changed. I contacted Adobe support but they said it was not their problem and I should contact Flickr. I personally think it is a Lightroom problem rather than flickr's as I can upload using the Flickr up-loader so I'm asking if anyone else has had a similar problem.

Answer 1

Hi Sally,
Sorry to hear of your difficulties and I also see you have posted onto the Flickr forum.   I have no answer to your stated problems particularly in light of your success with the Flickr up loader.  I cannot explain that.
In case relevant, the images I send up, which are not cropped, are all “the same size” (Canon 5D Mk II) however I occasionally still get one image in a batch which will jam the entire upload.    This is because with the Flickr publish service jpg quality I have set (some would argue unnecessarily) a jpg quality of 100%, my full res files are pushing the 20MB Flickr limit on a pro account.   The size limit for a free account is 15MB.   Even though the crop pixel size stays the same, some images compress better to jpg than others depending on their content.   It is unfortunate that the LR publisher does not tell you which of the files is failing.
I find out which image(s) is a problem by doing an export to my local disk with exactly the same settings as the Flickr up loader i.e. quality, sharpening and watermark and then by looking in the file system I can see which images have exceeded the limit.     The last time this occurred, I temporarily wound back the uploaded LR publishing quality to 90% just to get this failing image up.
I use Flickr a great deal with LR, and I know this is subjective, but in the last week I have had some reliability issues with Flickr uploads from LR, the Flickr desktop tool and the Flickr web page up loader.   This is for both images and time lapse videos.   It even led to me briefly look to see if Flickr had a service status log on the web.   I could not find one.
LR (vsn 3.5) has fixed some bugs with the Flickr publish service and although it still has some faults I generally find it very reliable and I am doubtful this is the source of your troubles.
If you are suffering a loss of confidence in the out of the box LR publishing service you could try the excellent Flickr plugin created by Jeffrey Friedl (google it).   This would give you another opinion.   If you are using the Flickr web based up loader you may also wish to try their desktop application to give another view.    I have now stopped using the Friedl plugin because I now find the LR built in one is good enough.
I have used all the methods of publishing I’ve mentioned fairly extensively, but I have to say I (now) find the out of the box LR Flickr service to be sufficient for me and quite reliable.    It has other niggles, but that’s another matter.     I know this answer is possibly just “noise” against your question, but felt I needed to add some balance to some of the Flickr feedback you have had.
My suspicion would be Flickr, your ISP or your local infrastructure and consider when you get a size failure double checking your limits by exporting locally.
Hope you have sorted it by now.
Alan.