What’s the best solution to have my family’s Android devices upload our photos to a specific directory structure and not just dump them into a default /photos folder, which seems to be every single generic solution out there?
Zune used to do this fantastically with our Windows Phones many years ago. I had it set up that when any of us returned home with our Lumia phones, they would then connect to my home wireless network and if phone was charging, our phones would automatically upload any new photos to a specific directory on my home network that I specified and in a /yyyy-mm-dd structure. Bingo, none of this manually transferring photos from phones.
Is there a solution in 2019 for this?
I do have a Synology NAS and although there are some options in DS File and DS Photo, there is nothing where I can set up a folder structure.
Well, really I think you have two problems. The first problem is getting the images transferred to a central location, and then the second problem is relocating them into your chosen directory structure within that central location.
For the first problem, something like this might work well
For the second problem, you may have more options… depending on what level of sorting you desire. (Heck, if it’s simply all files get moved into a folder based on date, that might be something someone could whip up in 40 lines of Python code.) Anyway, a quick Google landed me here: https://www.mjbpix.com/automatically-move-photos-to-directories-or-folders-based-on-exif-date/
You might also want to consider other tools to manage photos. One well regarded example is Luminar:
Note that I have never used either of the first two tools (I have used Luminar), so don’t consider this any recommendation… I just wanted to offer you a way to possibly break the problem down into two smaller problems that might be easier to tackle separately.
Does it have to be stored locally or can it be cloud based? I think that you can achieve what you’re trying to do via a shared Google Photos album. Once it’s in Google Photos, you can download/sort the photos offline as needed.
As much as I enjoy and use OneDrive and do back up everything there, including my photos, I don’t know of any way that OneDrive allows me to automatically upload photos from my device in a format of year and month folders. If it does, I’m curious to know how as this is an improvement, although this still doesn’t solve my problem. My format is yyyy-mm-dd in that I have separate day folders.
But I’ve always had backup enabled for OneDrive for my phone photos and it simply dumps them all into a single folder (SkyDrive camera roll).
Thanks for the tip. Nextcloud seems overly complicated compared to the old school Zune solution that worked out of the box, but this may be my only option in 2019
Thanks yeah, I already use my 1TB OneDrive space for full quality photo backups.
Number 3 is also not an option apparently as when they’re backed up they’re not put into a folder structure that I’m able to pre-determine (yyyy-mm-dd).
Frustrating that we’re in 2019 and there isn’t an easy solution for this and technically we’ve gone backwards.
One option is maybe to create shared albums in Google Photos. Still have to do a bit of manual organising, but at least Then you’ll all have access to photos you want to keep.
Luminar does not yet have real DAM (digital asset management) functionality. Looking forward to version 4 coming out soon, but the emails and blog posts I’ve seen about version 4 don’t mention DAM functions. They have promised, for a long time, to give us the capability of replacing Lightroom for DAM. Just not there yet.
