MediaSlurper Updates - Ep 3 - Multi Device Support

It's been a while since I've posted any updates about my "MediaSlurper" project...

Well, that's largely a good thing! Given that it was built as a personal tool to solve some very specific bottlenecks in my data management workflows, that means that in practice, it's largely been working very well for my needs (or at least, "good enough!), which is no mean feat, given that I run it at least 3-4 times a day, almost every day!   Granted, there are a handful over "very annoying" bugs relating to the various heuristics in use to avoid making duplicate copies of anything!)... but those only happen in very specific cases that I can always manually enable escape-hatch hacks in the code to work around! 

But yeah, in general, it's been working well enough that I've been able to pause active development efforts to focus on other more pressing matters  (e.g. "Picasa Replacement Project", and/or general life stuff)

 

Anyway, with the recent need to start urgently investigating properly migrating from old phone to new one (NOTE: I actually made the switch early this morning, and apart from a "major heart attack / moments of sinking terror" trying to get the Whatsapp transition to transfer over smoothly), I ended up running both phones for a while, and needing to be able to use MediaSlurper with both. This lead to a flurry of activity for the past few weeks, culminating in some of the final most useful stuff only coming online today, *AFTER* I have already effectively transitioned off the old phone.... 

Nevertheless, given that I don't know when I might need this stuff again (or whether someone else might find it useful if/when I ever release this tool), I have decided to keep plugging away at it to finish the last push of new functionality that should address a bunch of other things I've found myself really needing over the past month or two.

MediaSlurper Updates - Ep2 - Introducing a basic GUI + Cute Mascot

Time for another (hopefully) quick + brief writeup following another busy but relatively successful weekend of hacking away on this project. In short: I managed to tick off the biggest todo I had planned for the weekend (along with a few other smaller tasks), and with a few additional bonus points for good measure.

Introducing, the initial MVP UI for "MediaSlurper"

1) MediaSlurper  MVP GUI

Perhaps the biggest achievement this weekend was managing to put together an initial functioning UI for the media-backup scripts I've been working on for the past few weeks (see screenshot above).

Functionally, it's still very very crude (i.e. those buttons just call the existing scripts, but then they just execute in that existing terminal window backing this GUI (instead of in a dedicated GUI-wrapped window, OR via nicer GUI-driven UI's). But, most importantly, it serves the original goal of implementing this GUI in the first place (i.e. allowing me to launch these tools in ~2 clicks from the Start Menu, without needing to keep open a dedicated terminal window with 2 tabs - one for each script - open so that I can run them on the near daily / every-other-day basis that I end up needing these)

PhotoTool Project Updates Ep 1 - Initial Steps Towards Scripts to Ease + Automate Import + Backup of Media Data

For the past few weeks, I've been having a blast hacking away at a pair of scripts for automating some steps of my current photo management workflow that have thus-far been very labour-intensive to perform:  Namely, importing/backing up photos and videos from my camera (R5)'s memory card, and doing the same with my phone (Android).