File Synchronization App

mjohnsonperlmjohnsonperl Registered Users Posts: 41 Big grins
If there was an application that synchronized files from your computer with SmugMug, and back from SmugMug to your computer... what features would you want the program to have outside of just moving files around?

Matt

Comments

  • devbobodevbobo Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 4,339 SmugMug Employee
    edited October 20, 2007
    G'day Matt,

    Depending on how you handle the things on the client side, it would be awesome to automatically create cats/sub/galleries on SmugMug.

    Cheers, David
    David Parry
    SmugMug API Developer
    My Photos
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited October 21, 2007
    Let's take a look at the Phanfare client and steal, er, borrow some features:
    - Rotate locally queues up remote rotation
    - Crop locally queues up remote crop
    - Zoom locally queues up remote zoom
    - Local color effects queue up remote color effects
    - Local watermark queues up remote watermark
    - Choose as watermark locally queues up remote selection of watermark
    - Make sure you can view all EXIF info locally
    - Local red-eye fix queues up remote... oh wait, SmugMug doesn't have that. :-}
    - Allow local theme selection, gallery customizations, etc.

    Very wishful thinking:
    - Add a "hide photo" feature. Tagging a photo as hidden would creates a -hidden version of the Gallery with the private bit set, and puts any hidden photos into that parallel gallery. Unhiding those photos would put them back into the main gallery. So you'd have: "Tom's Bachelor Party 2007", and if you want to save those few incriminating photos of Tom for a later time, you would select those shots and choose "Hide Selected". In the background, you would create "Tom's Bachelor Party 2007-hidden" (or maybe use some random hash to make it really hard to find), and copy those photos to that folder.

    It's a total hack, but just a crazy idea. Phanfare offers a hidden option for all its photos, so I'm looking for a similar functionality, and I know that other folks have asked about "hiding" photos when they want to just upload everything (as a backup), but not every photo is something they want to show to the public, or even in a private gallery.
  • rkallarkalla Registered Users Posts: 108 Major grins
    edited October 21, 2007
    If there was an application that synchronized files from your computer with SmugMug, and back from SmugMug to your computer... what features would you want the program to have outside of just moving files around?

    Matt

    Matt, I'm going to need any such client to read my mind. Not just synchronize the files I have on my hard drive, but also the pictures I haven't taken yet... but would like to take.

    That's easy right? Ok cool :D
  • cmasoncmason Registered Users Posts: 2,506 Major grins
    edited October 21, 2007
    Ok just to keep it simple first:

    I would like to create folders on my PC, and have a tool that syncs them to galleries on Smugmug. So a folder called say "Trip 2007", inside the folder called "Travel", would sync the photos to a category called Travel, and a gallery called Trip 2007. Photos added or deleted on the pc side would be added or deleted in smugmug. Keywords, edits etc are synced.

    Would be cool if the tool could create folders based on my existing categories and galleries,then download photos from smugmug into these folders.

    Ok even cooler: allow customization of a gallery on the client, where I see what customizations look like before committing them to the website. Basically a local copy of smugmug.
  • colourboxcolourbox Registered Users Posts: 2,095 Major grins
    edited October 21, 2007
    Here is a scenario that I'd like to have covered. I'm sure you're aiming it at this sort of thing, but thought I'd make sure.

    Yesterday I created a gallery and rearranged the photos by position. I then noticed several images that need more processing. So I update the originals on my hard drive. To fix the Smugmug gallery, I have couple of options, neither of them ideal.

    A. I can do a Replace Photo for each individual photo. Tedious and labor-intensive.

    B. I can delete the photos on Smugmug and upload the corrected versions. But then the new photos would not replicate the manual sort order of the deleted photos, so I would have to arrange them again.

    If a sync tool could simply see that several photos on the disk have been updated, and to a bulk replace without affecting the manual sort order online, then I'll be looking forward to the sync tool.

    I could also see the sync tool coming in handy for times when multiple images need to be copied to a different gallery, since currently that's a time-consuming process of making duplicates and then carefully moving each duplicate image to the other gallery. Hopefully with a sync tool I could just update the local folders on my Mac with the desired files, and watch the online folders sync to match. On the other hand, that may not copy the Smugmug metadata, so maybe Smugmug still needs a bulk duplicate to other gallery (or better, bulk alias to other gallery) feature.
  • DavidTODavidTO Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 19,160 Major grins
    edited October 21, 2007
    It would be Mac compatible.
    Moderator Emeritus
    Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
  • mjohnsonperlmjohnsonperl Registered Users Posts: 41 Big grins
    edited October 22, 2007
    Well here is what I'm working on...

    I'm writing the app in Perl using XML::LibXML, REST and HTTP PUT uploading. I will be storing a local catalog (XML) of synched images so that the program will be able to identify when changes occur. I am going to try and build a simple TK GUI interface so that nobody has to use a command line if they don't want to. I will package it into a Windows binary executable, and once I am able to borrow my sister's Mac, I will try to build a Mac binary as well so I can distribute a cross-platform synchronization program.

    Because I'm using a local catalog to track changes, the sync will check to see if anything in the designated folder has been added and then upload it up to SmugMug, it will be able to check for changes to existing files and can replace the image on SmugMug, and if a image is deleted from either source 'local' (Your Computer) or 'remote' (SmugMug), then it will make sure the image gets removed in both locations.

    For deleting files I'm currently just moving the files locally to a deleted folder, and I plan on downloading the originals from SmugMug and archiving them as well so that accidents don't cause data loss.

    Right now the folder structure is just a list of albums, but I plan on making multiple options on how the local folder structure is maintained so that it could be managed locally as /Category/Sub-Category/. Once I get a complete working solution I should be able to build in additional features like this.

    I haven't determined how I'm going to manage the settings for new album creation yet because I'm still coding just getting the file structure to match, but initially I imagine I will have some kind of default settings for new album creation that can be changed to whatever you'd want the defaults to be.

    Right now I am almost done with the code that syncs all the content between a local system and smugmug. Once I'm done with that I'm going to try and build a simple GUI interface for the app, then build it into a binary so it's simple for anyone to deploy. When I get a binary out I'll let everyone know so anyone who wants to can play with the beta version. From there I'm going to start polishing areas of the app to make it more usable.

    I started this two weeks ago and I've been working on this every evening for the past two weeks, and my plan is to make for an extreamly compelling entry into the API contest as I REALLY want to win.
  • darryldarryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins
    edited October 22, 2007
    Well here is what I'm working on...

    I'm writing the app in Perl using XML::LibXML, REST and HTTP PUT uploading. I will be storing a local catalog (XML) of synched images so that the program will be able to identify when changes occur. I am going to try and build a simple TK GUI interface so that nobody has to use a command line if they don't want to. I will package it into a Windows binary executable, and once I am able to borrow my sister's Mac, I will try to build a Mac binary as well so I can distribute a cross-platform synchronization program.

    Perl! A kindred spirit! (Or fellow hacker.)

    Awesome. All of my SmugMug hacks have been in Perl. If you want, feel free to browse my code. It's usually pretty nasty, but I was proud of my last hack that implemented keyword parsing the same way SmugMug does it. It might be useful if you want to offer keyword editing in your app.

    http://www.darryl.com/smcomments2keywords

    Also, I put together a script that grabs the 4 most recent galleries and sets them to be your featured galleries. Oh, it doesn't use the API, just the RSS feeds and some POSTs directly to SmugMug's front-end (dirty!). But I suppose it's interesting in the same way a car accident can be interesting. :-}

    http://www.darryl.com/smlatest

    Good luck with the contest. And yeah yeah, my code is free for you to do whatever you want as long as you attribute it. BSD-like or whatever. I don't know what I'd do with 1/500th of an iPhone anyways. :-}

    --Darryl
  • austintedaustinted Registered Users Posts: 3 Beginner grinner
    edited October 23, 2007
    If there was an application that synchronized files from your computer with SmugMug, and back from SmugMug to your computer... what features would you want the program to have outside of just moving files around?

    Matt

    Check out the synchronization client that Sharpcast has. I would love to have this on smugmug. Very easy and effective. Point it to a directory and it replicates the structure on the site with album named after the directories.
  • pwsabmpwsabm Registered Users Posts: 1 Beginner grinner
    edited January 18, 2009
    When will it be ready?

    Well here is what I'm working on...

    I'm writing the app in Perl using XML::LibXML, REST and HTTP PUT uploading. I will be storing a local catalog (XML) of synched images so that the program will be able to identify when changes occur. I am going to try and build a simple TK GUI interface so that nobody has to use a command line if they don't want to. I will package it into a Windows binary executable, and once I am able to borrow my sister's Mac, I will try to build a Mac binary as well so I can distribute a cross-platform synchronization program.

    Because I'm using a local catalog to track changes, the sync will check to see if anything in the designated folder has been added and then upload it up to SmugMug, it will be able to check for changes to existing files and can replace the image on SmugMug, and if a image is deleted from either source 'local' (Your Computer) or 'remote' (SmugMug), then it will make sure the image gets removed in both locations.

    For deleting files I'm currently just moving the files locally to a deleted folder, and I plan on downloading the originals from SmugMug and archiving them as well so that accidents don't cause data loss.

    Right now the folder structure is just a list of albums, but I plan on making multiple options on how the local folder structure is maintained so that it could be managed locally as /Category/Sub-Category/. Once I get a complete working solution I should be able to build in additional features like this.

    I haven't determined how I'm going to manage the settings for new album creation yet because I'm still coding just getting the file structure to match, but initially I imagine I will have some kind of default settings for new album creation that can be changed to whatever you'd want the defaults to be.

    Right now I am almost done with the code that syncs all the content between a local system and smugmug. Once I'm done with that I'm going to try and build a simple GUI interface for the app, then build it into a binary so it's simple for anyone to deploy. When I get a binary out I'll let everyone know so anyone who wants to can play with the beta version. From there I'm going to start polishing areas of the app to make it more usable.

    I started this two weeks ago and I've been working on this every evening for the past two weeks, and my plan is to make for an extreamly compelling entry into the API contest as I REALLY want to win.
  • mjohnsonperlmjohnsonperl Registered Users Posts: 41 Big grins
    edited January 19, 2009
    pwsabm wrote:
    When will it be ready?

    I actually finished it back in November 2007.
    http://www.digitalmediashelf.com/syncmug/

    I haven't worked on it in a while, and haven't been using it, so I'm not sure if there are any bugs, but there are versions for both Windows and OS X.

    Matt
  • DavidTODavidTO Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 19,160 Major grins
    edited January 19, 2009
    I actually finished it back in November 2007.
    http://www.digitalmediashelf.com/syncmug/

    I haven't worked on it in a while, and haven't been using it, so I'm not sure if there are any bugs, but there are versions for both Windows and OS X.

    Matt


    Dude, that is very cool! clap.gif
    Moderator Emeritus
    Dgrin FAQ | Me | Workshops
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