Automatic Network Photo Transfer

The last part of my photo management project was to have an easy way to move images into Picasa. While we will use the Ubuntu box to view and edit pictures, most of our time is spent on our Macs. So there will be times when we have a folder of pictures on a Mac, and want to get that to Picasa as easily as possible.

I used Automator to create a stand alone application that should accomplish just that. First I needed a way to connect to the Ubuntu box. In Automator there is the option to connect to a server, but you have to make sure that that particular folder was shared and enter a password and bla bla bla… too much. Since I had passwordless entry through ssh set up already, why not leverage that to get to the Ubuntu machine?

With a little searching I found an upload with scp Automator action. Perfect! scp is an extenstion of ssh, and this Automator action takes care of moving the folder over too. To use it in Automator, I went to ~/Library/ and created the folder “Automator” then moved the .action file to this folder. When you restart Automator, the upload with scp action will be there. So the Automator workflow first uses “Ask for Finder Items” to select a folder and then “Upload with scp” to copy it to the correct directory on the Ubuntu machine. I have it set up to copy the folder into the “My Pictures” folder inside “PicasaDocuments”. That way, Picasa will automatically add the folder to its listing. It’s so easy!

I then saved the workflow as an application called “PhotoDrag”. Now when I want to copy a folder of pictures over to Picasa, I simply ctrl + space to open QuickSilver, type “phtod” to open PhotoDrag, select the folder, and thats it. PhotoDrag will use scp to move it over to Picasa, and Picasa will automatically add it to itself.

In order to use PhotoDrag on other Macs, you have to grab the scp .action file as well and put it in that ~/Library/Automator folder.

As an aside, I used Mikon to quickly / freely / easily change the ugly default Automator icon into something more relevant.