New app: MirrorMug

ColinB · January 24, 2006

MirrorMug is a Windows app for mirroring your Smugmug pictures to your local machine. I wrote it because I like to keep a local copy of all my pictures, but it kept getting out of sync when my wife would upload pictures, or I would forget to copy pictures over after I uploaded them. With MirrorMug, you just run the app and it automagically downloads any new pictures. I'm calling this version 0.9 since I really don't know how well it'll work, since I've only tested it on my computer.

You can download it from the Sourceforge page I made. If anyone tries it, post a reply in this thread and let me know how it works for you.

ColinB · January 26, 2006

Well, I can see MirrorMug has really captured everyone's attention. Regardless, I did a bunch of work on it today and uploaded a new version. I fixed some bugs, cleaned up a bunch of the code, and prettied the interface up a little. Again, if you try it, post a reply here. I'd really like to know if it works on other computers/Smugmug accounts.

Here's what's new, for those who care:

Broke updating info and downloading into 2 steps
Added a status bar and moved a bunch of the progress bar messages there
Made it so controls are disabled while downloading
Made progress bar have better info
Fixed a bug with canceling while getting info from Smugmug causing a memory leak
Fixed a bug where your album cache would get cleared if you canceled while getting album info from Smugmug. (Note: the album cache is just to speed up checking for updates, it doesn't have anything to do with your pictures.)
Removed DialogBlocks crap from the source code, so it's easier to read. Also that way I don't have to pay $65 to add another control.

rainforest1155 · January 26, 2006

Colin,

first of all welcome to dgrin and thanks for sharing your work with us!

I hadn't the chance yet to check your tool out, but I've got an idea for a useful new feature, if you haven't it in already:
Having an option to exclude albums on category, subcat or gallery level would be great as for example I'm having certain very large galleries consisting of all the photos of a month for the purpose of having an offsite backup. I wouldn't want to download these again. Keeping them in sync wouldn't be bad, but I guess you can't specifiy different sync folders for certain galleries and I don't want to move my whole image collection to a different location.
Just some thoughts. Even though I'm concentrating on other applications (Star*Explorer) as my main concern is to get my images with captions and keywords uploaded to smugmug. Downloading just hasn't been a part of my workflow as most of the time I upload from my PC and not from others.

Still - keep up the good work as they're often people enjoying the fruits of your labor, but for whatever reasons deceide not to post here. That's probably a good sign as there haven't been any problems yet.

After some time they'll probably run into some issues and come back to you.

All the best,
Sebastian

SamirD · January 29, 2006

I'm very interested in testing your application. What are the system requirements?

I will be shooting and uploading an average of 1000 pictures a week from March to October of this year. It would be very, very nice to be able to have an application that can keep an updated backup locally. I already plan on using StarExplorer to handle all my uploading.

Andy · January 29, 2006

Hi Colin welcome to Dgrin!

Looks like an interesting app - I'll be watching!

ColinB · January 29, 2006

It should work on any version of Windows Samir. I've only tried it on XP though. It's pretty simple to use, go ahead and download it and give it a try. It's free, so you've got nothing to lose.

SamirD · January 31, 2006

Well, I've got mainly 98se machines. Do you think it will run on them? I'm still working on getting my first xp machine up and running.

devbobo · January 31, 2006

SamirD wrote:

Well, I've got mainly 98se machines. Do you think it will run on them? I'm still working on getting my first xp machine up and running.

:yikes step away from the keyboard !!!!

'98 was like 8 years ago dude

SamirD · January 31, 2006

devbobo wrote:

:yikes step away from the keyboard !!!!

'98 was like 8 years ago dude

Scary, eh?

Keyboard? You mean keyboards--all 22 of them. :yikes

But I didn't mention how old the computers were too--most are pentium pro 200s and p3-450/500s, so 98se is the best that they were ever designed to run.

One machine isn't too powerful, but pack 8 of them on a good kvm switch and another 10 for other odds and ends and you have a pretty good workgroup.

They have to have decent RAM and a fast HD, but they'll move pretty good with that. People who have used them swear they're 1ghz machines.

My 486dx33 web server pushes out 500k/sec serving and my PP200 web server can xfer over 25MB/sec from disk to disk when mirroring.

Of course, they're on 95 vs 98se.

Someday I'll have time and money to upgrade my infrastructure, but right now, they get the job done fine. I'm not going to try to fix something that is working.

Nikolai · January 31, 2006

Welcome!

ColinB wrote:

MirrorMug is a Windows app for mirroring your Smugmug pictures to your local machine. I wrote it because I like to keep a local copy of all my pictures, but it kept getting out of sync when my wife would upload pictures, or I would forget to copy pictures over after I uploaded them. With MirrorMug, you just run the app and it automagically downloads any new pictures. I'm calling this version 0.9 since I really don't know how well it'll work, since I've only tested it on my computer.

You can download it from the Sourceforge page I made. If anyone tries it, post a reply in this thread and let me know how it works for you.

It's great to have another dev guy onboard!

A quick question:
did you get around private/password protected galleries and galleries with disabled originals?
Cheers!

Mike Lane · January 31, 2006

SamirD wrote:

Scary, eh? Keyboard? You mean keyboards--all 22 of them. :yikes

But I didn't mention how old the computers were too--most are pentium pro 200s and p3-450/500s, so 98se is the best that they were ever designed to run.

One machine isn't too powerful, but pack 8 of them on a good kvm switch and another 10 for other odds and ends and you have a pretty good workgroup. They have to have decent RAM and a fast HD, but they'll move pretty good with that. People who have used them swear they're 1ghz machines. My 486dx33 web server pushes out 500k/sec serving and my PP200 web server can xfer over 25MB/sec from disk to disk when mirroring. Of course, they're on 95 vs 98se.

Someday I'll have time and money to upgrade my infrastructure, but right now, they get the job done fine. I'm not going to try to fix something that is working.

So you're using ie 5 or something huh?

SamirD · January 31, 2006

Mike Lane wrote:

So you're using ie 5 or something huh?

For most general web stuff, yep, whatever's built into 98se. Most sites don't have a problem with it. But for real work, it's FF.

:

My default setup is just a striped down system with the OS and some small programs kept locally. I made a small program for 95/98 like xp's system restore back in the late 90s. I use it whenever the system gets gunked up by something. It's actually a lot more robust than system restore as spyware and even viruses can't touch it.

All the regularly used programs reside on the file server, which doubles as a web server and a print server.

Everything's just really lean and mean, so I don't wait around for stuff to happen, and even when I have to, I switch to another system and keep working.

:

It's a good way to leverage all this free old hardware and my empty pockets.

ColinB · February 1, 2006

Nikolai:
No, I didn't get around the private galleries issue. I didn't know about the disabled originals deal, but I assume MirrorMug has that limitation too. Seems like it's a bug in the API, so the only way to get around it would be screen-scraping. Yuck. I'd imagine you know more about that than me though, since StarExplorer seems to be the most complex Smugmug app.

I did link to the beta API though, since it makes things easier and it doesn't seem to ever be coming out of beta. I have update notification built into MirrorMug, so I figure if the API breaks I'll just put out a new version.

SamirD:
Like I said, I haven't tried it on Windows 9x, but I'm not using any features that should prevent it from working there. Give it a try on one of your ancient machines, you can be the first 98 tester.

jberd126 · February 1, 2006

I've been thinking about creating something similar to this. Looks like you beat me! Kudos.

Does it support embedding the smugmug captions and keywords into the IPTC image data? That is something that I really wanted to do.

-J

ColinB · February 2, 2006

jberd126 wrote:

I've been thinking about creating something similar to this. Looks like you beat me! Kudos.

Does it support embedding the smugmug captions and keywords into the IPTC image data? That is something that I really wanted to do.

-J

No, it doesn't support IPTC right now. As a matter of fact, I didn't even know what that was until I Googled it. The only problem with using the IPTC info is that Smugmug gives you an MD5 sum for every photo, and I use that to make sure the ones on disk are ok. If I added IPTC info the sums would be off. To get around that the original MD5 would have to be embedded in the info or something.

SamirD · February 2, 2006

ColinB wrote:

Like I said, I haven't tried it on Windows 9x, but I'm not using any features that should prevent it from working there. Give it a try on one of your ancient machines, you can be the first 98 tester.

I just tried it, but it wouldn't download anything. It quickly flashed something near the status bar, and then the status read "Local mirror is up to date".

Now I'm not sure if this is a 98se thing or if it is because I have over 70,000 photos that would need to be downloaded. :uhoh

SamirD · February 2, 2006

And just for information, it won't run on 95.

ColinB · February 2, 2006

Wow, 70,000 photos? I think you'll blow your download limit if you try to sync all that. You can let it download for a while then cancel it though, it'll pick up where it left off the next time.

As for your problem, the "Local mirror is up to date" thing may be a bug, where it tells you it's done but it actually had a problem (bad login info or something). You'll want to look in the log panel, or open the last log from the log folder and see what's in there. I'd be interested in any info you can find out.

SamirD · February 2, 2006

ColinB wrote:

Wow, 70,000 photos? I think you'll blow your download limit if you try to sync all that. You can let it download for a while then cancel it though, it'll pick up where it left off the next time.

I think I'm going to be doing that anyways. I'm planning on using around 30-100gb of bandwidth a month. It's still cheaper than trying to pay someone else to manage all of this and do it in-house.

ColinB wrote:

As for your problem, the "Local mirror is up to date" thing may be a bug, where it tells you it's done but it actually had a problem (bad login info or something). You'll want to look in the log panel, or open the last log from the log folder and see what's in there. I'd be interested in any info you can find out.

Duh, why didn't I think of this! Here's the results from the log:

13:29:48: Command: Login
13:29:57: Command Succeeded
13:29:57: Command: Get Album Tree
13:29:59: Command Succeeded
13:29:59: Error: can't open file 'D:\Smugmug\MirrorMug.cache' (error 2: the system cannot find the file specified.)
13:29:59: Error: can't open file 'D:\Smugmug\MirrorMug.sum' (error 2: the system cannot find the file specified.)

ColinB · February 3, 2006

Well, those two errors aren't really anything serious, that's just what happens when you run it for the first time. It seems like it logged in ok and just didn't find any albums. I'll see if I can dig up a copy of 98 and try it for myself.

ColinB · February 3, 2006

Well, I dug up a copy of 98 and installed it in VMWare. I noticed the default directory wasn't right (since there isn't a "My Pictures" folder in 98, whoops), but other than that it worked fine. It got the info for all my albums and told me how much it needed to download. I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. It could be something about your machine, or it could have something to do with your Smugmug account. I'll see about putting some extra debugging info into the next build, so we can see if there's anything your machine can tell us. Thanks for testing it though!

SamirD · February 4, 2006

ColinB wrote:

Well, I dug up a copy of 98 and installed it in VMWare. I noticed the default directory wasn't right (since there isn't a "My Pictures" folder in 98, whoops), but other than that it worked fine. It got the info for all my albums and told me how much it needed to download. I'm not sure why it didn't work for you. It could be something about your machine, or it could have something to do with your Smugmug account. I'll see about putting some extra debugging info into the next build, so we can see if there's anything your machine can tell us. Thanks for testing it though!

Hmmm...interesting. I tried it on two different 98se machines on this end. But I did specify a drive letter in the path to mirror to. Would that hurt?

ColinB · February 5, 2006

SamirD wrote:

Hmmm...interesting. I tried it on two different 98se machines on this end. But I did specify a drive letter in the path to mirror to. Would that hurt?

No, the drive letter missing is a non-XP bug. You need to add it to sync right now. Your problem is something else that I haven't figured out yet.

SamirD · February 6, 2006

Cool. Well, let me know if you want me to run any specific tests. I'll do whatever testing you need on 98se.

:

New app: MirrorMug

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