Fraser Speirs is the developer for the wonderful FlickrExport tools for iPhoto and Aperture (I use the Aperture plugin every day) and Darkslide, an iPhone app that allows an excellent Flickr experience on the handheld.
When Apple announce iPhoto 09 was going to have a built-in Flickr exporter, I was worried. Often times, when Apple “adopts” a technology that was available as a 3rd party add-on, usually that 3rd party add-on goes away, but Fraser Speirs’ own look at iPhoto ‘09 may prove that sometime the 3rd party guys get it right:
iPhoto ‘09 really, really wants to make Photosets for you. When you select even one photograph to upload, iPhoto will create a single-photo set for you. You have no way to stop this from happening. Do you put every photo you upload to Flickr in a Photoset? I certainly don’t. That said, I suppose this makes sense if you’re dumping an iPhoto “Event” en masse into Flickr.
[…]
iPhoto’s sync connection to Flickr critically depends on you not deleting the photoset that iPhoto created for you when the photo was uploaded. If you delete that set from Flickr, the syncing is permanently and irretrievably broken as far as I can tell, since there’s no way to recreate the link from the Flickr source list item to another set on Flickr.
The iPhoto-creating-a-photoset thing is annoying. Real annoying, but Speirs’ review goes a lot deeper. Go take a look. I think I’ll be staying put with Aperture and FlickrExport.