Well Flickr have released a new Uploadr tool. They had one some years back that was discontinued and now they have brought out this one that, to be frank, does look a lot like the Google Photos uploader tool.
However anyone who is expecting it to be like the previous Uploadr (which was a third party tool) will be very disappointed. While it can store photos automatically into albums, they are all set to private by default and there is no way to change this behaviour as there are very limited configuration options. The software is really set up as a backup tool, not an upload tool for publishing photos.
The biggest problems I am seeing with this software is that it is very slow and often stalls during the process (I would guess it is unable to deal with upload timeouts, which seem to be a common feature of the Yahoo platform). This means you are bound to have to close and restart the software if you are uploading a lot of photos at a time. The initialisation phase of the software seems to involve a lot of disk churning and take a very long time to complete.
The only really useful feature on it is the built in deduplicator. This is the one thing that makes it almost worthwhile to have. But it could be so much better and have the ability to publish albums as well, considering that they appear like normal albums in my photo collection; they just aren’t public.