digiKam – Facebook export

by Pedro M. S. Oliveira | Jun 19, 2016 | Daily life, Linux

I use digiKam as my primary photo manager, it’s a great professional tool for those work with media. Maybe you are one of these and you didn’t even noticed, look at your mobile phone probably you have hundreds (maybe even thousands) of pictures on it. If you sum the ones you take with your camera it will be even more, so after a few years some of us may have more than 100.000 pictures.

This is why you need a photo manager and I would strongly recommend digiKam. I’ve been using it for years and I love it.

One part of taking pictures is be able to share them, digiKam supports exports to several social media web sites; Facebook, Igmur, Twitter, Flickr, etc.

Nevertheless the integration with Facebook is not working properly, and I doubt that the digiKam developers can do something here as it looks more of a Facebook issue. I’ve came out with a workaround that may help go around this issue if want to use the Facebook export function. Just follow these easy steps (I’ve done this with digiKam v5, but it will also work on v4):

1. With your default browser log in to Facebook.
2. Open digiKam from a console, just type digiKam on the command line.
3. Inside digiKam go to menu export, choose export to Facebook.
4. On the export dialog press change account.
5. You’ll see that in the browser it just states success, nevertheless you don’t see the authentication link that you need to use to paste into the plugin dialogue.
6. On the console where you started digiKam you have some of the debugging info of what is happening
   1. digiKam uses OAuth to authenticate with Facebook so look for a line like:
      • OAuth URL: QUrl(“https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?xxxxxxxxxxxxx
7. Copy the content of that line starting on “https://…token” (without the quotes)
8. Enable debug mode on your browser (I use Firefox CTRL+SHIFT+C or F12)
9. On the debug window select network and persistent, see selected options on image bellow:
10. Paste the URL that you got on this list step 7 on the browser
11. On the debug window you should be able to see an entry like the one bellow, with a right click choose copy location
12. Go to the digiKam Facebook export plugin window and just paste.
13. YOU’RE DONE

Now you can share all those pictures to world 🙂

Just select the pictures you want, use the export plugin, choose your Facebook album (or create a new one within digiKam), choose to resize (or not the images). If you create a new album be careful with the the permissions you wish for the album, on the Add Album option you’ll be able to select who do you wish to share your pictures. By default all your friends will be able too see it, but this may not be right for all the albums so just choose careful your options, usually I choose only me and then on Facebook page I add who I want to share it with.

More about digiKam

• A professional digital photo management application for KDE (it will work on Linux, Windows and MacOS), which makes importing and organizing digital photos a “snap”. The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections
• Powerful, fast and automated tagging
• An easy-to-use interface is provided that enables you to connect your camera directly and preview, download and/or delete your images
• A Light Table function is provided. This tool assists artists and photographers with reviewing their work ensuring the highest quality only
• Common filters are available out of the box, with side by side previews
• Extensible by the use of plugins and recipes

Hope you enjoy this tool as much as I do.

Have fun,

Pedro Oliveira