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My Photo Storage Solution

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I have been searching for a photo storage solution. My solution only involves two devices, a raspberry pi and an external hard drive. This post will explain how to set up your pi in order to automatically transfer RAW and JPG photos from an SD card to the hard drive connected to the pi. The scripts I used are available here.

I like this solution because the entire process is automatic. You are notified when the photo transfer has finished with an email. Also, for redundancy, I created a cron job that syncs all of the photos on my hard drive to Amazon photos. I use this service to sync the photos in the cloud.

Steps

Mount the external hard drive to a folder on your pi.
  • sudo fdisk -l take note of the Device, something like /dev/sdb1
  • I like to mount the drive under the home dir, sudo mount /dev/sdb1 ~/external_hd/
  • Run lsblk -f to know here files are mounted
Create a udev rule
  • udev rules live here: /etc/udev/rules.d
  • cd /etc/udev/rules.d
  • touch 50-sdcard.rules
  • chmod +x 50-sdcard.rules
  • sudo fdisk -l again to find the sd card device name, in this instance ‘sda1’
  • echo 'KERNEL=="sda1", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/home/pi/sdcard/sdcard_added.sh"' < 50-sdcard.rules
  • tail -f /var/log/syslog is extremely useful for debugging udev rules
Create an fstab privilege
  • vi /etc/fstab
  • Find device uuid with blkid
  • Add UUID=<your-uuid> /home/pi/SD_CARD auto rw,users,noauto 0 0
  • Uncomment out ‘user_allow_other’ in /etc/fuse.conf
rsync when an sd card is added
  • touch /home/pi/sdcard/sdcard_added.sh
  • chmod +x /home/pi/sdcard/sdcard_added.sh
  • create the script
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#!/bin/bash

echo "`date +%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M:%S` SD card inserted" >> /home/pi/sdcard/output.log
mount /dev/sda1 /home/pi/SD_CARD
rsync -av /home/pi/SD_CARD/DCIM/100MSDCF/ /home/pi/external_hd/raw_photos
Sync photos to cloud provider
  • Set up cron job
  • sudo crontab -e
  • 00 4 * * * /home/pi/sd_card/rclone_cron.sh, this runs the cron job at 4 am, daily
  • create the bast script
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#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/rclone sync /home/pi/external_hd/raw_photos/ amazon:raw_photos --config /home/pi/.rclone.conf -v
Send Email Notification
  • I used this post to easily add email notifications when the rsync process completes
Tips Since Creating My Photo Process
  • I could not get the above code to work with Debian due to permission issues
  • It is better to identify from UUID instead of KERNEL for setting up udev rules, run ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid to discover device UUID’s
RClone
  • Amazon has blocked all thrid party applications from pushing to Amazon Drive. For more information see this
  • I am going to implement Duplicati as a solution to sync my photos to Amazon Drive
  • Another potential solution is to continute to use rclone, but host the files on Google Drive

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