Auto Lower Resolution Image and/or Video Backups 1

[kjv1611]

This thought of mine is coming up as just now starting to use "smart phones" - my wife and I. The issue is I'd like us to be able to backup ALL our pictures, if possible, in lower resolution form on our phones, so we can easily access them from our phones at all times. Mainly for my wife, but it'd be good for both phones. If I can find a way to do the same for videos, then that'd be great. I'm not looking for the Skydrive solution, though it sounds like that might work as a possibility.

Here's what I'm actually thinking would be great:
1. Have standard Pictures and Videos folders on Windows
2. Have a process that runs, keeping track of them all, and syncing those to Pictures_LowRes and Videos_LowRes folders.
3. If the process finds a file that is in one folder, but not the other, then it grabs a copy of the missing file, and converts it to a standard resolution or percentage, or some combination thereof. For instance, if it's already low-res, I don't want to lower it, but I would also probably have a default resolution or at least height or width, and maybe a default file format for saving to.
4. Then use a separate sync application or profile to sync the _LowRes folders to the "smart phones" - and any other mobile app we may happen to use in the future.

Maybe that is overkill, but it's my initial thought. That way, we'd always have our family photos and such at our fingertips, even if the cell and wifi networks were down at the same time for some reason.

I think an alternative method would be:
1. Replace our currrent router with a new one that supports a USB hard drive
2. Save low res images/videos and/or original (copies) to the USB drive
3. Use phones over cell/wifi network to browse the images/videos on home network.

The latter is nice, but the problem is it'll require an always on setup whenever we're away from home. It's not super terrible, I guess, since I won't be terribly concerned about that while out of town most of the time, but I would like to somehow work out the first option well, first.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. If it involves buying new equipment, it'll definitely have to wait until next year.

I know there are several programs which handle image conversions, even in batch mode. What I'm looking for is more of a set and forget setup. For making sure files are synced at home, I use SyncBack Free. I know I can use Picasa to resize an entire folder of pictures, but don't know if it'll handle recuring/monitoring tasks in that regard. Also, not totally sure of such a program that would auto-handle things for videos.




"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 15:57

 

[rclarke250]

Why not just get a micro sd card, and put them on that in the phone? Also have you looked at using cloud storage, like Dropbox,Google Drive, and others? Yes you would need an active network connection. Have you looked into a NAS? Network attached storage? My D-Link came with the ability to create a d-link account and then use it to share folders from my NAS on the internet, just need to log in to my account, again it would require an active network. Also why would you want to lower the resolution of the video and pics? My Galaxy S4 has a 13GP camera on it, and a very nice display. If it's to cut down on data charges, I would just get a Nook or Kindle HD, and load up a 64GB SD card, and just carry that around.

 

[ChrisHirst]

You could use BitTorrent for the purpose it was really developed for?

http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

Also Picasa 3.9 has a "Sync to Web" setting which will update the remote storage if and when any changes are made to the local Picasa album.

Chris.

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[kjv1611]

Thanks for the suggestions.

As for why I want a reduced image, I'm not just talking about pictures taken on our phones. I'm talking about ALL our images. And frankly, we have a LOT of pictures and videos - tons of "baby pictures", vacation pictures, etc. When our one child was first born, we had so many pictures and videos in the first month that I could not fit them on an 80 GB hard drive - that was 6 1/2 years ago.

We've not always taken that many pictures, but we do have QUITE a lot of them.

I do store the camera pictures on the Micro SD card in the camera, and now have a couple of cloud services I'm trying for backup - so far, they both seem to be working fine. I like Drop Box in the way it works, but you only get 2GB free - I'm not complaining, just comparing. I also started "Mega", and got 50GB free, which if that one works would be more ideal.

I thought about using Picasa, since we use that at home for general picture viewing anyway. Just haven't taken the time to really dig in and test it. I know it has options to export pictures. Any idea whether it has options in the backup / sync settings to auto-resize images?

Oh - I also realize that modern phones can do 720p and 1080p, but really - at that screen size, I don't think I'll be too upset if my 10MP picture is reduced to say 5MP quality, or so forth.

Now, if I could carry around 1TB in my phone, or have 1 TB in cloud storage for free, then we'd be talking.

Also, all of this is not what I EXPECT, just what I wish for. Mainly because my wife will randomly go back and look at lots of the old pics/videos of our son as a baby/toddler, and there are times she'd like to be able to share them. Well, if I could compress everything enough, then maybe - MAYBE - we could share them on the phones as well.

I'm spending most of my time spent on the phones trying out different apps / settings, to see what I can do.

Right now, I'm using a Motorola Defy XT on Republic Wireless, and am planning on moving to the Moto X in February. I'm hoping they offer the 32GB model by then (no SD card storage), but I can make do with 16GB.

It's a brave new world for me. Coming from Blackberry Curve 8330m which we had for something like 5 years.

"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 15:57

 

[Nelviticus]

Rather than automating everything (which would solve your problem but is probably impossible) why not just process everything you currently have, then turn down the image size/quality settings on your phone(s) so that future pics & videos are smaller? You can always turn them back up again if you want to get a high-quality shot or footage for some reason.

Irfanview is a fantastic (and free) Windows image viewer that also has powerful batch processing built in. You could use that on your PC to shrink all of your existing pictures - resizing will save much more space than reducing the JPEG quality but you could try both.

Videos are harder and much slower to shrink. Handbrake is a free and popular video processing app with a batch mode; I'd use that.

Alternatively, upload your photos and videos from your phones to a web service automatically. I don't know what OS your phones run but on Android the Google+ app can automatically upload new photos & videos, the Dropbox app can do just photos and you can get an app that automatically uploads new pics to Flickr. All of these can be configured to delay uploads until a wi-fi connection is available.

Nelviticus

 

[kjv1611]

Thanks. Yeah, that's what I was guessing - no one good way to do all what I'm wanting. I definitely do not plan on reducing the size of the originals. I prefer to keep the originals in the well, original, state - best quality I can store. Now, if I did RAW photography, that might be different, but I don't.

But yeah, I could handle just setting up my desktop sometime to run through say one year's worth of pictures or videos, and see how long that takes, and go from there.

I guess what I was thinking of, sort of, or at least where I partially got the idea from, is the program, Syncback. It has an option to save the backups as a compressed file. However, it's talking about using a .zip file, which is good for storage, but not so good for sharing between devices - if you want to just open up an image or video and see it.

Alright, maybe I'll get something like that going. On the other hand, another thought I have, which I think I will want to do maybe around tax time next year, we'll see, is to first upgrade my router. Then attach a USB hard drive to the new router to be used as a NAS, and setup a routine to always backup our pictures, videos, docs, etc to that NAS drive. Then I could setup a way to just get to those from our cellphones... and just not fret about trying to convert everything.

I don't know, we'll see.

"But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." 1 Corinthians 15:57