Dropbox Photo Organizer

by Carl Furrow — on  ,  ,  , 

Ever since Everpix was shut down, I’d been searching for a replacement to store, and share photos. I was using a hybrid solution of managing photos locally in iPhoto, and then letting Everpix upload those events/photos to the cloud. Then to share it, I’d simple go to Everpix’s site, and share the event. Simple! Sadly, that ended when they closed their virtual doors.

I was back to just using iPhoto, and was getting tired with how hard it was to share photos now. iCloud was not the solution was hoping for. Dropbox was nice, but it required me to copy photos out of my iPhoto library file structure and into a Dropbox folder somewhere, then share that folder. Tedious.

I thought that maybe giving up iPhoto altogether wouldn’t be a horrible idea– it was getting slower with all my photos inside it, and its file organization was a mystery–it made more sense for the computer, than I. I wished it was organizing by “year/month/day”.

Thinking I could script my way into using just Dropbox for a bit, I created photo_organizer. It’s a little script that can listen for photos to be inserted into your Dropbox’s “Camera Uploads” directory, and then sort them into another photo by “year/month” (I gave up on ‘day’).

My workflow became something like this:

  • Take a photo on the iPhone
  • Let dropbox auto-upload the new photo to it’s “Camera Uploads” directory
  • My personal computer would notice the incoming photo being downloaded from Dropbox, then run “photo_organizer” on it.
  • The photo would get moved out of “Camera Uploads”, and moved into my “Dropbox/Photos/year/month” folder.

Worked great! I could then come back to the Dropbox Photos folder, and organize photos into sub-folders for events, etc (“Dropbox/Photos/2013/12/holiday party/”).

I think I’ll give this a try for a bit, and see how it goes.


Carl Furrow's photo Author

Carl Furrow

hello@carlfurrow.com

Addicted to learning and looking to master the art of solving problems through writing code, while occasionally yelling at computer screens.