vivian is a digital media renamer and filer written in Python. Give it source and destination directories and it will look for jpegs, MOVs, and mp4s in source. For photos, it will pull out the date/time digitized and camera model metadata from the EXIF headers and rename the file using the metadata, to a format of:
CAMERA_MODEL_YYYY-MM-DD-hour-min-sec-AM/PM.jpg
OR...
iPhone_5_2014-08-06_6-07-18-PM.jpg
OR...
in the case of DSLR (Nikon in my case), add in the photo number from the original
camera filename (usually something such as DSC_1234) to deal with burst shots
that have the exact same timestamp:
CAMERA_MODEL_<photo_number>_YYYY-MM-DD-hour-min-sec-AM/PM.jpg
For video files, it get the video creation time from the atom header and renames the file to:
YYYY-MM-DD-hour-min-sec-AM/PM.mp4
OR...
2014-08-06_6-07-18-PM.mp4
After the rename, photos are filed by date to directories like so:
./2014/08/05/
vivian is currently running on a headless Raspberry Pi Model B hooked up to 2
1TB Samsung USB removable hard drives. vivian pushes to one drive, then a
rsync cronjob syncs to the second drive daily at 5AM, as a backup.
I wanted a solution where my wife and I could take photos with our phones and then file the "keepers" somehow. I decided to go the following route where you manually upload the files yourself to box.com. I'm sure you could setup a true sync to just automatically push all photos (I do this on my Android phone with Dropbox). Problem with that is that the vast majority of photos snapped with your phone are total crap, admit it. There are only a few good keepers worth filing.
Also, I wanted to be able to upload photos taken with a real digital camera. Box lets me do that as well by just sorting out the keepers on my laptop, then uploading them to box.
box.com offers free accounts just as do Dropbox and Bitcasa, among others. What makes Box stand out is their support of the webDAV protocol, which is supported on Linux. You can essentially create a drive that is in sync with your Box account.
All of the following commands were done under Raspian, so YMMV.
First, create a directory for Box locally:
$ sudo mkdir /media/box
Install davfs2, a Linux tool for connecting to WebDAV shares as though they
were local disks:
sudo apt-get install davfs2
Edit the file /etc/davfs2/secrets and add the next line at the bottom
of this file:
https://dav.box.com/dav username password
Finally, make mounting fully automatic. The Box cloud file system
will be mounted to /media/box when the system boots, which makes it
available at all times.
Edit file /etc/fstab:
$ sudo vim /etc/fstab
Add the following line:
https://dav.box.com/dav /media/box davfs rw,noexec,auto,user,async,_netdev,uid=pi,gid=pi 0 0
On your phone or tablet, install the Box app for Android or iOS and login with your free account. Push some photos to the account.
Back on the Pi, list the contents of the /media/box directory:
$ ls /media/box
20140627_120714.jpg 20140628_122316.jpg 20140718_113022.jpg
20140628_104135.jpg 20140710_215935.jpg 20140802_105343.jpg
20140628_104211.jpg 20140714_203812.jpg lost+found
20140628_104214.jpg 20140716_104404.jpg
You can also login to Box through their website, drag and drop photos from your computer, and they will also show up in the webDAV mount.
So now we have:
- One Rapsberry Pi Model B
- One Belkin powered USB hub,
- Two Seagate 1TB drives
- Our laptops, phones, tablets that we want to push photos from
- Vivian running on the Pi
davfs2installed and running on the Pi- Our box.com account wired up to a local directory via
davfs2 - Android/iOS apps on devices to push photos up to Box
- Drag-n-drop access to box.com on laptop through box.com website
Finally, to make this fully automatic, we need to setup a cron job on the Pi to run vivian every N minutes.
I learned the hard way that editing the crontab in vim isn't a good idea - the changes don't take (I'm probably doing something wrong). So on the Pi, run:
$ crontab -e
This opens up your crontab in nano. Add the following line:
*/30 * * * * /path/to/run_vivian.py
The above command executes the Python script run_vivian.py every 30 minutes
on the half hour.
Be sure to make run_vivian.py executable:
$ chmod +x run_vivian.py
Make sure the shebang in run_vivian.py is correct for your system. On my
Pi it is:
#!/usr/bin/python
The following is how to mount the 1TB drives on the Pi.
Get a list of all drives:
$ sudo fdisk -l
My disks ended up being sda1 and sdc1
Make directories for the mounts we about to create:
$ sudo mkdir /media/bu-1
$ sudo mkdir /media/bu-2
$ sudo mkdir /media/bu-1/share
$ sudo mkdir /media/bu-2/share
Mount the drives to the directores just created:
$ pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo mount -t auto /dev/sda1 /media/bu-1
$ pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo mount -t auto /dev/sdc1 /media/bu-2
Install Samba
sudo apt-get install samba samba-common-bin
Backup Samba config file:
sudo cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.old
Edit the samba config file to add in our drive
$ sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf
Add this:
# ======================== bu1 HDD ==========================#
[backup-1]
comment = Backup folder
path = /media/bu-1/share
valid users = @users
force group = users
create mask = 0660
directory mask = 0771
read only = no
Bounce Samba:
sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
Create backups user that can access the Pi's Samba shares:
$ sudo useradd backups -m -G users
$ sudo passwd backups
Enter your password
Add backups user to samba
$ sudo smbpasswd -a backups
Enter your password
In Finder, go to Go > Connect to Server, enter:
smb://10.0.1.50/backup-1/share
$ sudo vim /etc/fstab
Add these lines:
/dev/sda1 /media/bu-1 auto noatime 0 0
/dev/sdc1 /media/bu-2 auto noatime 0 0
Now when the Pi boots, your drives get auto-mounted.
So we have backup-1 as our main target directory for photo storage, backup-2 is
meant to mirror backup-1 for redundancy. Add a cron job to run rsync daily
at 5AM to push deltas over:
$ vim crontab -e
Add this line:
0 5 * * * rsync -av --delete /media/bu-1/share /media/bu-2/share/
- EXIF.py
davfs2(install throughapt-get)
I couldn't have done this without these great guides: