Bulk Uploading Phlux Series and Photos

It is possible to bulk upload photo series into Phlux. The photos need to be organized and named using the following instructions. A CSV file describing photo series metadata must accompany the photo image files, again in accordance with the instrictions below.

Contact North Arrow Research (info@northarrowresearch.com) if you require help bulk uploading photos into Phlux. A nominal fee is charged for performing this service.

Photo Image File Organization

The photos should be organized into separate folders for each series. It is recommended that the folder names avoid spaces and special characters. The photos themselves should be in JPEG or PNG image format. The file names should end with an underscore and then date of acquisition in the following year, month, day format:

image_name_yyyymmdd.*

CSV Metadata File

A plain text comma separated value (CSV) file must accompany the image files. The CSV file should have the following columns. Do not quote strings in this file, and be careful not to include any commas in any of your fields.

• NAME: The name of the series. (Required, <100 characters)
• DESCRIPTION: A description of the series. (Optional, <1000 characters)
• LATITUDE: The latitude of the series location. (Required)
• LONGITUDE: The longitude of the series location. (Required)
• ACCESS: The access level of the series. Must be 'open', 'public', or 'private'. (Required)
• TAGS: A list of tags to apply to each series. Pipe separated. (Optional)
• FOLDER: The path to the folder containing the photos to upload. (Required)

Notes

• Only new photo series can be created with this process. It is not possible to append photos to existing series.
• At the time of writing, photos uploaded with this process appear within Phlux as being owned by a special user account that we use for this process. We are not currently able to assign different users to owning the series or photos.
• Bulk file renaming software can be useful to help organize the image files.

Example

Example folder structure for two fictional series. Note the image formats are mixed and the photos can be out of order.

Root folder

    my_series_metadata.csv

   series_01

      legacy_image_20120120.png

      another_image_20170601.jpg

      yet_another_image_20231212.png

    series_02

      fresh_series_20110416.jpg

      retake_20010902.png

Example CSV file:

NAME,DESCRIPTION,LATITUDE,LONGITUDE,ACCESS,TAGS,FOLDER

my cool series,Facing north and 1m from trail,49.000023,-117.1234,open,tag1|tag2,series_01

second series,standing on bridge facing north,44.123456,-124.1234,open,tag2|tag3,series_02