I’ve been trying to automate some more of my mundane home IT tasks in order to make them take less time. As a general rule, I do avoid using the cloud as much as possible in an automated fashion. It would make some parts of this a little easier (particularly with automatic syncs, however for running processes against the files, it seems better keeping it all local. I’d rather use my home storage backed up to Crashplan than try to integrate my workflow with Onedrive.
So the first step is to get the photos off of my phone and onto my home server. I run an Android phone so I’m using Foldersync Pro to get them to my server. Foldersync supports a huge array of transfer types. Currently, I’m running FTPES to do the transfers. It’s a paid app, but there is a free version. Worth the $5 in my opinion. I have it scheduled to run nightly to back up the previous day’s photos. This is a bit aggressive, so I may increase the lag time to a few days so that I have more photos immediately accessible on my phone.
Once the photos are on my server, a nightly scheduled task runs to split the live photos into separate JPG and MP4 files. The resulting movies and any other MP4 files are dumped in my home video directory for future sorting, while the JPGs and DNG files get pushed over to my desktop for import to Lightroom. To split the files, I’m using ExtractMotionPhotos from here. Free app, highly recommended.
This is where the automated process ends. Lightroom does not import automatically to folders by date. So, every few days I have to do an import off of my import directory. I’m going to have to go digging through the plugin API to see if that’s something I can cobble together,or whether I’ll have to forever manually import as needed.
That’s my current semi-automated workflow. At some point, I’ll need to share my Lightroom back to phone workflow.