Ftp publishing

Backlight 4, 5 & 6 Support
#1

Is there a feature in Backlight that can watch a folder and integrate photos, that are uploaded via ftp instead of the upload form and integrate them into the existing album corresponding to that folder?

I recently got a camera that can ftp photos directly out of camera to any server. I would like to upload every shot I take without editing for everybody to see while the match is still going on.

#2

Hi @michilge, Backlight doesn’t have functionality like that. I have considered it for Backlight and other projects in the past, with a couple of models that come to mind -

  1. “Auto-albums”. In this approach, you’d create a directory via FTP and update photos to it. The publisher CMS (e.g. Backlight) would then display an album to users who browse to that location. The downside or difficulty of that approach is the lack of structure - how to define things like the page title or template.
  2. FTP drop-point. In this approach you upload images to a specific folder (e.g. backlight/uploaded-images). Albums are managed in the same way as they currently are in Backlight. The current ‘Upload Photos’ would be supplemented with an equivalent function to source images from the specific folder. Renditions would then be created and populated in the location of the album itself, with the end result being identical between this and using the ‘Upload Photos’ function.

Which of those two is closer to what you’re thinking of?

#3

Hi Ben,

first, my heartfelt greetings to You, Matt, Rod and everybody in the community. Best wishes for all our families and whoever is dear to us.

My Idea is closer to the second variant: A target directory for uploads could be pointed to an existing album.
Somewhere in the publisher section there might be a central place with a list of all currently existing albums allows to pick which one is meant to be filled with the photos in the drop directory.

Alternatively in the album designer there might be an option to choose the currently edited album as the target album. Clicking and saving would remove the target pointer from the previously marked album.

Best wishes
Muchael

#4

Hi @michilge, thanks for the greetings. Wishing you all the best for the Christmas season as well!

I have a better idea of what you’re looking for, thanks. I haven’t yet had a chance to talk to Matt about it, but I do feel that this is a specialised function that wouldn’t be of general interest in Backlight. Out of interest, what camera are you using that has FTP functionality?

#5

Hi Ben,

I use a Fujifilm X-H2s with the file FT-XH transmitter accessory. It can connect to my cell phone as a hotspot. I also have a travel router with a power bank for locations where I am offered a LAN port.
The file transmitter has room for two additional batteries. It offers other functions, but the WLAN ftp capability is why I bought it. Also for occasions when media people must be prepared to getting harrassed, but that is a different story.

This week I am invited to an indoor football tournament where they have a big screen in the anteroom. They decided against streaming video to the screen. Instead it is planned to just show my most recent shot alternating with the ranks of the tournament.

Which might be an idea for albums with a hero image. With every refresh of the album view the current hero image could be replaced by the most recently uploaded.

Best wishes
Michael

#6

Hi again,

thank You for Your estimation, that this might be a function too niche for a feature in Backlight.
I discussed the idea with an it guy who proposed to try and automate the existing publisher web frontend with a scriptable headless browser like browserless with a scripting addon like puppeteer.
I haven’t been down that rabbit hole yet, but I have a server that can run things like browserless in a docker container. Should I succeed, I will post an example.

#7

After observing a file upload with the developer tools of my browser, I managed to write a very simple script that runs on my NAS at home and watches a local folder for new files being transferred from my camera.
It uses curl to log in to the Backlight Admin pages with my credentials, stores the PHPSESSID, traverses my camera_inbound_dir and sends each new photo to BL by using the target URL uppy would use. (The one with “ajax_add_photos”)
I could use cron to invoke this script periodically.

I would be very thankful, if You would give me the green light for going this route. If You consider this as a form of reverse engineering, I will respect this and have to think of something else.

Best wishes and thankful as always
Michael

#8

Hi @michilge, that sounds like a good solution. I have on trouble with you using that approach. We discourage editing Backlight itself (which you haven’t done) because it creates support headaches, can get users into difficulties (especially if the solution is shared) and creates issues with our regular updates, which will overwrite any changes. All your changes sound external from Backlight.