NOTE: This page is marked as draft and is therefore still a work-in-progress. 

gim

yes, i know i keep renaming this thing because the scope and plan keeps changing by the day. for now, its ccmm.. more to come.

Introduction

go-import-media, aka gim, is a tool for automatically importing media from removable disks into a predefined folder structure automatically.

Why?

We generate ~100GB of media data each week at church and currently, I am inserting one SD card or flash drive at a time and copying to my laptop, then syncing up to the server and then finally syncing to the additional storage drives + backblaze. This is super tedious and wastes a lot of time.

The goal of this project is to automatically import and organize media when it is inserted into the machine. Since there are different types and sources of media, this project needs to be able to identify the type of media and organize accordingly.

Features

Current

• Auto-mount an external drive (USB or SD card) that was connected to a Linux system via udev
• Scan the mounted directory to determine if it was produced using a known data source (see supported media sources below)
• Scan the directory for files that should be imported and gather metadata on them
• Import any identified files to a predefined folder structure
• Auto-unmount the external drive, then power off for safe removal
• Allow importing of media via integrated localsend server. Once a transfer completes, it will follow the usual import process to identify and import media
• Localsend can be password protected and also supports sender ACLs (not intended for real security, more to prevent accidental ingestion of data)

Planned

• Optionally empty/format a drive after import (will be configurable per-source type)
• Build and integrate with a microcontroller to provide LED status lights for each card reader/usb port - (this might finally be a reason for me to buy a rasberry pi.. instead of adding an arduino)
• Add status endpoint to server API for quickly checking status of importer
• localsend https support
• logging improvements
• support for running on mac with as full a feature set as possible. haven’t yet explored mounting, unmounting, looking up volume names, etc. Sorry, no windows support planned because windows.

Media sources

Supported

• behringerX32 - For importing stereo audio recordings created by a Behringer X32
• blackmagicIOS - For importing video recordings created by the Blackmagic IOS camera app
• canonEOS - For importing video and photos created by a Canon EOS camera (at least a 60D, not testing on any other yet)
• canonXA - For importing video created by a Canon XA series camcorder, recording in MXF mode (only tested on XA70)
• jackRecorder - For importing multi-track wav files created by the fox-recorder

Planned (not yet built)

• behringerXlive - For importing multitrack audio recorded by a behringer X-Live card
• zoomH6 - For importing multitrack audio recorded by a Zoom H6 field recorder

Dependencies

Linux:

• blkid
• findmnt
• udisks2 (for mounting, unmounting, and disk poweroff without sudo access)
• udev
• systemd
• polkit

Mac: (coming soon)

Installation

coming soon…

Usage

coming soon…

License

gim is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license

Copyright (c) 2024 Steve Cross flip@foxhollow.cc

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Portions of the code, specifically those providing localsend server functionality, were originally written by MeowRain for the localsend-go  project. The files in question all have the MIT license clearly mentioned in the file header. For the sake of simplicity, any additions by Steve Cross to the localsend files are also licensed under the MIT license, while the rest of the gim project is still licensed under Apache-2.0. For a complete copy of the MIT license text, see the LICENSE-MIT file in the root of this project. The following copyright applies to all localsend-related files only:

Copyright (c) 2024 Steve Cross (additions on or after 2024-10-30) Copyright (c) 2024 MeowRain

Links

• Project on GitHub 
• Project Homepage