Fixing Fotos For Flickr

I heart Connected Flow’s FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto, but one thing it does not handle well is the ICC color profiles that iPhoto adds to photos. The problem is that a photo that goes through this workflow only looks good if the app that displays it (i.e. the browser) understands the embedded color profile.

Firefox does not.

Safari does.

Internet Explorer does not.

There may be hope for Firefox eventually, but until then, things work better if you use ColorSync to convert the image to the Generic RGB profile, then upload to Flickr.

This is fairly straightforward:

1. Run ColorSync Utility (in Applications > Utilities)
2. Open the relevant image
3. In the menus down at the bottom, select “Match to Profile” and “Display > Generic RGB Profile”
4. Click “Apply”
5. Save

I went and made an Automator plug-in for the Finder’s contextual menu. It’s really easy, just two steps:

1. Finder > Get Selected Finder Items
2. Preview > Apply ColorSync Profile to Images

Though now I need to replace the seven images that I recently uploaded directly from iPhoto. Blah.