Geeks Can Now Upload to Picasa via Command Line

If you’re a geek (as most of you apparently are) and prefer doing stuff through command line rather than a GUI, Google has just introduced a new command-line utility that allows you to access various Google services.

GoogleCL is an application written in Python that lets you do things like upload a whole folder of photographs to your Picasa account with a simple command like this:

google picasa create --title "My album" ~/Photos/vacation/*.jpg

This would grab all of the JPG photographs in your vacation directory and upload them to a new album called “My album”.

Here are the possible commands for Picasa:

create: Create an album. create –title “Summer Vacation 2009” –tags Vermont ~/photos/vacation2009/*
delete: Delete photos or albums. delete –title “Stupid album”
get: Download photos. get –title “My Album” /path/to/download/folder
list: List photos or albums. list title,url-direct –query “A tag”
post: Add photos to an album. post –title Summer Vacation 2008″ ~/old_photos/*.jpg
tag: Tag photos. tag –title “Album I forgot to tag” –tags oops

The utility isn’t limited to Picasa, of course. You can also manage Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, and YouTube data.

To get started head on over to the GoogleCL Google Code project to download the tarball. There’s also a manual and a page of example commands.