Least-Effort Picture adding

[Billy Crook]

I want to see a feature that monitors a directory for new images, and assimilates them into MediaGoblin. I should be able to plug in my camera, when /media/foocamera appears, goblin sees it, copies the pictures off, and empties the camera.

I should be able to visit my GMG webpage then and see them in a gallery.

[cwebber]

Hello Billy,

Presumably you're speaking of something along the lines of using the API along with some sort of local file directory monitoring tool?

Have you seen: http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/293 ?

[Billy Crook]

Thanks for responding Chris! I'm intending to run gnu media goblin on my personal GNU workstation, which happens to be globally route-able. I similarly run a web-based RSS reader off my GNU workstation and a few other things.

This might be an edge case a few years ago, but on the precipice of ipv6, it is entirely reasonable to believe that by the time Goblin hits its 1.0 release, most people's machines will be entirely capable of serving web pages without mucking around with port forwarding. Given this, a gamin or filesystemwatcher-like object could literally receive filesystem modification notifications from the kernel when any file is added to X. Then a user just drops pictures in to /home/bcrook/Pictures/ and Goblin slurps them up and puts them in the web app. Likewise for cameras being plugged in.

I had not noticed issue 293, and it does seem like it would be a more modular way to achieve what I'm wanting. I guess I'm suggesting that in addition to that API, such a filesystem monitor daemon should be included with the Goblin project. Even if someone wasn't running Goblin on their desktop, they might find it pretty easy to sshfs-mount the server, and drag pics there, and just know that they're available in a flashy gallery the instant they're done copying.

One reason I don't use sites like flickr is that I don't want to click a button and browse for a file and click upload and repeat for each file I want to share. I want to use rsync, scp, or cp.

Before I heard of Goblin, I was hoping for some apache module that would translate a directory of images into a nifty gallery, on the fly; similar to how options Indexes turns a directory of files into a fancy html-rendered file listing.

[cwebber]

Thanks Billy! This is what I thought you meant.

I agree this would be a nice feature. I think it will probably be a third party extension that uses the API (or maybe some official script that would come bundled or packaged externally for this) but there's no reason why not to track it here.

For now we don't have the ability to implement it though, so I'm doing the following:

• Marking this as low
• Setting this issue as blocked by the API ticket.

When the API stuff is resolved, this will be a good ticket to re-evaluate then.

Thanks for the idea!

[willkg]

The original url for this bug was ​http://bugs.foocorp.net/issues/396 .
Relations:
#27: blocked

[LotusEcho]

Now that we have plugins how doable is this?

[cwebber]

I think this is even in a sense already done by ​https://github.com/joar/automgtic ... maybe the only thing that is missing is it doesn't "watch" the directory. That could be handled by a cronjob though?

Marking as fixed unles I'm wrong :)

[cwebber]

Even though this isn't part of MediaGoblin? core (and shouldn't be probably) it at least is now possible, which means this can be closed.

[Velmont]

incron might be a very good fit for this along with automgtic.

Anyway, a good thing with doing it via the API even if it's all on the same computer is that it'll be network aware from the get-go.

If you don't want to copy files around, my gmg_localfiles plugin might also be possible to use for this. :-)