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.
Main Highlights from this Multi Device Work so far:
* I've now refactored most of the "Android FTP" code to define more of the constants and so forth in the config file (instead of hardcoding in the script)
* Then, I proceeded to enable defining multiple per-device "profiles", with the ability to make these perform multiple-inheritance from "base templates"
* I also upgraded the "custom operations" definitions in the config file to migrate them from a fixed set of "secret operations", to "being fully fledged "custom operations" (e.g. for repeatedly transferring data out of specially marked folders - e.g. when saving stuff off from particular forums / groups), with the the ability to have more control over when these get dumped
"Advanced" Multi-Device Features on the Roadmap:
* 1) Being able to simultaneously log into multiple devices in parallel, and run the same command on both at the same time
* 2) Interactively browsing / exploring the contents of each device, and issuing custom operations to work with these
* 3) More powerful operations (e.g. porting over the grouping stuff done for camera photos, and do it for screenshots / other custom categories too?)
* 4) Use the "FTP" definitions to do the same things when connected via USB (e.g. for use when in a foreign hotel room but without a shared network connection)
Very Annoying Duplicate-Prevention Heuristic Bugs:
* Android - Need to filter the paths use to determine "last phone picture" so that the use of one device doesn't prevent the downloading of all photos from the other phone. (The hard part is preventing duplicates when we don't know which device may have been the source)
* SD - Daylight savings switch causes *ALL* timestamps to now look different on the card vs on disk. Have worked around it for now by dropping the time component and comparing on dates only, but this may have issues when crossing time-zones around this time. (Oh well... this is not currently a major issue for me)
* SD - Deleting photos from local (on disk) folders (OR starring them) seems to end up marking them different, resulting in those photos getting downloaded again on the next import.
* A few others I've forgotten right now...
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