Photo Importinator
It imports photos!
This is suprisingly tricky and none of the apps I tried did it right!
…So I wrote my own, dang it!
- Distributed under MIT license.
- See code in GitHub.
- Complete rewrite in Python is underway; no official release as of yet.
- Final “stable” PowerShell version is still available for download.
Contents
- History — or why is this stuff so hard, and why does this script exist?
- Usage — how to set up and configure the Photo Importinator
Overview
“What mighty contests rise from trivial things.”
—Alexander Pope
The intended audience of this software are people who host their photographs locally on a NAS and use local digital asset manager / photo management software (e.g. digiKam, ACDSee, what-have-you) to access them.
The purpose of this script is as simple as this:
- Import images from SD card or locally auto-synced cloud drive (Dropbox, OneDrive, etc) to a NAS.
- During the import, perform conversion from camera-specific raw formats to DNG.
- Automatically create backup file of the original files (in case you ever need them again).
You may be asking why does this script exist at all. Despite this being such a necessary and ubiquitous part of photography workflow, and the fact that this feature also exists on many DAMs too, it might not work the way you expect it to. It’s surprisingly easy to mess things up. (The history section has a whole lot more ranting.)
So, the aim is to minimise the user hassle and be flexible.
As a practical example: This is how I import images from my camera to my NAS. I stick the SD card on my computer, and type
> photo_importinator import Nikon_D780
Simple, right? (Used to be that you could just enter the camera name, but now we have fancy subcommands.)
But alas! Sometimes, Windows decides that the SD card should appear as E:
instead. Oh no, what will I do now?! Why, never despair! Just do this:
> photo_importinator import --card E: Nikon_D780
…and on we go again!
The script allows for flexible configuration of the whole process, with different settings for different cameras and different import targets.