jlehikoinen.github.io

Photo management v1

Posted: 01.03.2015

Updated solution here.

Here’s my photo (and video) management setup. It’s pretty much based on Federico Viticci’s photo management solution except I have replaced Hazel with a script-based solution.

Nowadays most of the photos are taken with iPhones in our household and viewed later on with iPads. I have also Nikon 1 J1, but it’s used quite rarely. I wanted to have one centralized storage for all photos and videos which is available from every Mac and iOS device. Here’s how the photo and video management setup was built.

Setup

Components:

Pre-requisites:

How it works?

In a nutshell:

  1. Take a photo with iPhone
  2. Open Carousel app -> photo is automatically backed up (uploaded) to Dropbox
  3. On Mac mini: 3.1. Photo is synced to Dropbox Camera Uploads folder 3.2. LaunchAgent watches changes in Camera Uploads folder 3.3. Script moves the photo to a correct folder based on file metadata
  4. Open Carousel or Unbound app on iPad and view the photo
  5. Check the changes from Dropbox RSS event feed or from a log file

More technically detailed description of the script can be found on GitHub.

Folder tree example

The folder tree naming system is basically designed for Unbound app and easy sorting. The screenshot is in Finnish, so here’s a crash course on Finnish language:

Directory tree

iOS apps

I use three different iOS apps for different tasks with photos and videos.

Here’s a little Carousel and Unbound comparison if you are not familiar with these apps. I use Carousel for skimming through photos and videos and Unbound for viewing non-compressed videos and photo metadata.

Feature Carousel Unbound
Content All Dropbox media 1 Dropbox folder
Caching Automatic Automatic & manual per subfolder
Video compression Yes No
Metadata viewer - Photos only
Price Free 2,99 € (Not universal)

iOS Parental Control

If you don’t want kids to access Dropbox, you can protect Dropbox with a passcode.

Carousel on the other hand can be quite risky if you leave your device unsupervised. Carousel has a Delete button visible when viewing single photos or videos and there’s currently no way of disabling it. And it’s no surprise that deleting files via Carousel also deletes them from Dropbox.

Unbound has a Disable Delete functionality in the Settings > Viewing.

Sharing

There are plenty of options how to share files with Dropbox, Carousel or Unbound. Share a single file with a link or a complete folder etc.

If you have opted out using iCloud Photo Library or Photo Stream (like I have), you can still use iCloud sharing with friends or family members who have iOS devices. Here are my Photos & Camera settings:

iOS Photos & Camera settings

Backups

Dropbox has it’s own version history system, but always have a local backup solution in place as well.

If you plan to add lots of data to your Dropbox it might be wise to exclude Dropbox folder from your Time Machine backups on other Macs that use the same Dropbox account.

Manual importing

This system works with manual importing as well. Just drop files to Camera Uploads folder on your Mac. It doesn’t matter which Mac is used for this because when the files get synced to Mac mini they are moved to correct location in the folder tree.

Only downside is that you need to select the files manually that you want to import. Maybe a script that checks the date of last file that was imported or future feature to the current Python script?

Summary

Compared to iCloud Photo Library and Photo Stream this has been a smooth run so far. No surprises, no duplicates or weird behavior.

If you don’t like Dropbox, it can be easily replaced basically with any cloud storage provider or with your own NAS.

Pros

Cons