When uploading large files, a stream is passed to the API:

Flickr.getUploader().upload(InputStream, params)

However, REST.java buffers everything in to a ByteArrayOutputStream before passing it to the scribe OAuth library. Therefore, uploading large files can often cause out of memory errors (depends on the size of file and heap of course).

Scribe OAuth (as far as I know) doesn't support any streaming yet, so we could either create our own implementation, swap out for an implementation that does support this, or ask and wait for those guys to fix theirs.

I've opened an issue on Scribe related to this:

scribejava/scribejava#347