I must be one of a dying breed of people who maintain their photo collection on their own servers because a quick search for tools to help synchronise a hosted album with Facebook yielded few results.

There are plenty of options if you use hosted services like flickr or picasa. I also found this app that is specifically designed for the Gallery album software which I could probably have bent to my needs but I wanted something that was not app specific so that was excuse enough to embark on my first FB app.

The Application [Link to Application on Facebook]
The application uses 2 RSS feeds to communicate the album and image data. I assumed that most albums would publish feeds to allow users to keep up to date with the latest album updates so this seemed like the a reasonably standard interface to use.

1. The album feed
   The application consumes a feed that contains basic information about the albums in your photo collection. This is just to allow users to select which album they would like to import.
2. The picture feed
   This feed points to the location of the images themselves. The application currently only looks at the enclosures. The descriptions etc could be used (if provided) to populate captions…

Currently the application uses the ‘guid’ associated with the album and passes this as a parameter (you can specify the paramter name in the settings) to the picture feed. This could obviously work differently but gets the job done for now.

The application then creates a Facebook album with the same name and cycles through the images and uploads them to the newly created album. The photos are uploaded in batches to avoid timing out the request. The batch size is configurable for the moment.  The uploader will also split images over multiple albums when the number of images exceeds a limt (also configurable). The current FB limit is 60 images per album. The labelling of split albums is also configurable to some extent.