Could this be used for automating our live event photography workflow?

[jlachoff]

I am a UX designer, but also run an event photography practice at a software company in San Francisco, where we shoot conference events and publish our photos immediately to live slideshows at the events we shoot. Our workflow is currently built on EyeFi mobi pro SD cards, iPhones, and IFTTT, but we are looking for an alternative solution that is less error prone more customizable. I was researching the RAVpower filehub as a possible alternative solution, but the company tells me that there is no (official) way to automate the transfer of files from an SD card, and also no SDK or APIs— and then I found your project.

Being a software company, we have the ability to contribute code to enable our workflow, but I see that it's been a while since anyone worked on this project, so I thought I would ping you to ask if you think it's worth pursuing this approach based on your experience, and whether you know if the project you published works with any of the newer filehub products.

The ideal scenario for our workflow would be that we switch to shooting on standard SD cards, and then simply put an SD card into the RAVpower device from time to time, which would automatically transfer just the protected jpeg images (only) directly to some connectable cloud storage service, and would be able to reliably avoid sending duplicates across repeated sessions.

thanks in advance!

[gmaclennan]

Hi @jlachoff thanks for your interest in this project. I have not actually used this project since I was hacking on it a few years back. I believe the more recent versions of the filehub have different firmware and need a different hack to get access to the OS. I would say this is very much a hack - the embedded Linux on these devices is very limited, and has limited memory - I put the binaries on the external drive since they would not fit on the device itself.

The problem you outline I think is a common one and I wish a device existed to do this. I think you could do something similar with a raspberry pi zero W and an SD card reader. The nice thing about the Filehub was the hardware was built with a nice case. I would love to see an open source hardware project using a Pi to do this, it would allow more flexibility such as adding LEDs to indicate progress, and a web interface that could be accessed from a connected phone.

[jlachoff]

Thanks much for this detailed response. The pocketable enclosure was definitely a big draw of the Filehub. I would be interested in a pi zero -based solution too, but getting it into a form factor that would be durable enough for a multi day shoot seems like a bigger project than I will have time for.