Using robots to improve photo upload workflow
In the darkest corner of the newsroom, bounded on one wall by library-style bookshelves and a long cubicle on the other, there sit two computers. They’re stacked vertically, attached to the same LCD (how fancy!) monitor via a KVM switch.
They sit and hum, silently when they’re first booted up and much louder after any length of time, and one of them grinds horrendously when it tries to seek information from the deepest recesses of its brain, much like me when someone asks a question during WWE RAW. They are vestiges. Relics. Antiquated reminders of the 20-plus-year old system we recently dumped in favor of a new (CLOUD-BASED, we’re so hip!) publishing system.
Together, they jointly ran the vast majority of our automated processes, barely doing together what even a relatively modern machine could do with ease all on its own. Make no mistake, automation is our mantra at the York Daily Record. We don’t want to make people do what robots (/machines) could and/or should be doing. To that end, we have a couple big projects in the hopper in addition to a seemingly endless series of smaller ones that crop up and are dealt with in the course of a day or two.
But the loud, imminent demise of Automator (the name of the program we used to schedule and task) meant that the project was getting pushed to the front of the line. Since we were replacing, we wanted to at least modernize the computer (running Windows 2000 since the old client could go no higher), and hopefully the program.
Since most of the work is now handled in the cloud, filing photos served as the big workflow we wanted to tackle. With the advent of mobile journalism, it’s not uncommon to want photos from the photographers at the scene. Unfortunately, our current setup required a VPN into our local server, then an upload to a drop folder that got pushed to the server. All that effort only took care of the print end, and required a laptop to get the particular flavor of VPN working properly.
What we wanted was an easy way to get photos from any device (photographers frequently work using only their phones or tablets, because it’s one less and/or lighter piece of equipment they have to lug around versus a laptop) and push it to three places — the web, print and our archive. The simplest solution seemed to be getting the file into our system and then moving it around from there.
Enter Dropbox. It’s extraordinary how even free services can do what used to require expensive services that were frequently more unreliable. Using the free 2GB Dropbox plan, we made sure that all of the devices were syncing to the same account, as well as to the “new” automater machine.
(Since a new AutoMate license is somewhere between $995–1495, we grabbed an old 10.6.8 iMac that was lying around and pressed it into service.)
After spending the better part of a day getting Apple’s Automator program to do all of the steps I wanted, four hours of testing proved enough to determine that Folder Actions, succinctly, suck. They were frequently skipping files and then just letting them sit, or worse yet failing and still moving them on. Luckily, a $28 program called Hazel is like Folder Actions, except it actually works. Highly recommended. That, plus the $5 Yummy FTP Watcher, resulted in us having a robust system for filing from the field that’s a) easy for photogs to use, and b) results in us getting the quality of photos we need in the places we want.
This would be much easier nowadays, as you'd just have a cloud-based Digital Asset Management system, but the budget would also be MUCH higher.