MediaSlurper - Phone Data Archiving Tools

Mwahahaha... had very productive hacking session yesterday on my MediaSlurper tools  (mainly on the phone backup side)

Main Changes:
* Hacked together fancy new thing custom-op mode to make it possible to go through and selectively archive screenshots, while moving the old ones out into their own folders. 

This makes it easier to archive a whole bunch of the less important ones, then just delete them from the phone 1-2 years later to free up space

(Unfortunately, web-browser ones cannot be distinguished from the filenames alone, and will need OCR processing integration to solve later - I have a tool I can integrate, but I'd like to switch that away from Windows OCR since I'm moving away from the platform soon-ish, and need these tools to keep working)

* Hacked together another custom-op mode that only does the moving-between-directories on phone too

* Then plugged a whole bunch of cases where timeouts could bring down the ship, by wrapping all the native calls with a wrapped-API that makes it retry several times before giving up

* Then bolted on mechanism to get these custom modes to run before a nominated main mode (i.e. so the "main / fixed" one won't double-capture these files)

 

Implications:

The main implications of all this work is that I've now been able to archive all my Photos + Screenshots from last year into more manageable bundles, with the idea being that I can periodically do the same going forwards for these same collections but maybe in smaller half / quarter-year bundles instead.

The main reason for doing all this though is to make these datasets more easily manageable, so that the "default" folders only contain the newest stuff, while the older stuff that I have backed up can more easily be batch deleted to free up space if/when required  (which is a big problem I had on my older phone)

 

Next Steps:

There is still a few more more big pushes I'd like to do on these tools before leaving them alone for a while:

* 1) Introduce the same date-based grouping support to custom-ops / screenshot folders as I've currently got working for the camera ones

* 2) Add new tools to the main launcher to retrospectively apply such date-based regrouping breakdowns to nominated folders

* (3) Maybe finally finish implementing up the event-proximity based chunking for finer-grained grouping, that would really ease my post-shooting-day cleanup activities (especially when on a trip)

* 4) Integrate all the various local-backup + archival actions I've been meaning to automate, and have these be single-click actions from the launcher too

* (5) Maybe get around to putting in place the nicer GUI frontends and/or finish refactoring the code to split the phone backup tool into smaller files (i.e. it's now almost 70kb, which is way past time for a refactor, but really, I've just been focussed on making it work while still being portable / possible to run standalone if need be)

* 6) Properly retest on Linux again to make sure it all works

* 7) Add extra options to avoid downloading stuff older than certain dates

Yeah, some of those will probably take a few more weekends or a few "locked in" days to solve. But, hopefully when all this is done, I'll really be able to move on to really getting into my Parus + Collagen + Picasa Replacement projects  (or alternatively, Kea-lite + finishing "Dad's App")