Hey…it’s your hard drive. Can we talk?

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10 years ago

This post is linking up with Teaching Trio. You can find similar posts searching under the category Linking Up.

This week I would like to share how I handle family pictures. I know that it is not strictly educational technology, but during natural breaks in the school year it is nice to take a “vacation” from school stuff and organization and thinking through work flow of files is a skill which can transfer to our school lives as well, right?

My goal is to share one candid picture of my children once a day via my website I share with my family members who live 850 miles away. So that a 365 challenge is not a daunting chore I need some heavy mobility and automation to my work flow. A function of “a picture a day” is that I have too many pictures and also needed a way to archive those pictures. Instead of loading up a computer hard drive and then suffering the performance consequences – there has to be a better way…or you might end up surprised and hurt at an end of a relationship with your hard drive.

While some of these are paid services, you could substitute some free services. For instance, Dropbox has 2GB free and if you refer people who sign up you can earn more space, you could skip Posthaven and just use Tumblr or another free website to which you can email posts. The great news is that IF This Then That (IFTTT.com) *is* free and that is the magic glue that make me appear super prolific to various family members who may be checking sites other than my “current” preferred site.

Do you need a strategy for a Project 365 – how about just having kids?

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I can walk you through my process…

I have the original pictures on my phone which I email to my Posthaven blog:

IFTTT.com allows me to put in place what they call “recipes” which automate some of my cross postings (I post to Tumblr and Flickr, but have two separate recipes):

(In this example you see I emailed 4 pictures to Posthaven and am cross-posting to Flickr, well please know that Flickr only displays the first image and will not display videos)

When I get home I open the Dropbox app and because I am on wireless images from my phone upload to my Dropbox:

Here is the hidden mess, my constant challenge, I need to clean this up monthly:

Does it make you feel better that I shared my mess of a Dropbox with you? I hope so, because I am feeling a little vulnerable just about now. How about a shot at redemption?

Under the default Camera Uploads folder in Dropbox I have folders by year with month inside (01 versus 1 for January will help them stay in order):

At the end of a month, I copy all pictures with the date of that month and move them into a folder I created at the start of that month. Now all pics from one month are in one folder:

Now I move that folder with the full months worth of pictures into the current year folder:

Last month is now stored under the year and you can make a new folder for the current month and move the pictures into that folder when the current month ends:

I would love to hear if you think this might work for you, if you have some suggestions to improve my workflow/automation, or maybe just share your picture websites.