Let’s be honest: importing and managing personal media without relying on big tech software is a stressful, itchy, and exhausting process. I am constantly trying to make it as simple, quick, and reliable as possible, but I am having a hard time. Below I noted some some of my experiments and the steps I currently follow.

Basically #

1. import everything in an isolated folder
2. run DupeGuru (VIDEOS MANAGEMENT?)
3. run exiftool

Transferring files #

Android #

The cleanest way to move files from an Android to a MacOS device is by using ADB.

1. Connect the phone to the computer;
2. Open the terminal and move to the platform-tools folder (I keep in Documents): cd Documents/platform-tools;
3. Check if the two devices are connected correctly by running ./adb devices;
4. Navigate in the phone directories ./adb shell, ls -al;
5. once the path of the directories which contain the content that has to be copied on the computer has been noted, execute ./adb pull /path/in/phone /destination/path/on/computer;
6. Done. This is how simple, neat, fast, and powerful this process is.

iOS #

I still haven’t figured the best way to transfer a lot of images from iPhone to MacOS. AirDrop is wonderful, but it cannot work with all of the photos and videos in my mobile gallery.

PhotoSync #

To save pictures from my iPhone to linuxplosion I use photosync. Here are the key steps I performed to set everything up:

1. make a desktop computer remotely reachable via SSH
2. Importing pictures automatically via SFTP
3. I configured PhotoSync so that directories based on date are automatically created.
4. I set a weekly reminder to make me start the import when Linuxplosion is scheduled to be on