How can I resize and upload event photos while I’m still shooting?

Question

I shoot sports events in JPEG and often come back with hundreds or thousands of images. My current workflow is sequential: shoot everything, batch resize the files for web use, then upload them. That means the first photos don’t appear online until hours after I started shooting.

I’d like to parallelize the process so new images are transferred from the camera as I shoot, resized automatically, and uploaded right away over limited mobile broadband. I’m aware of Eye-Fi-style wireless transfer to a nearby device, but I need the next step too: software or a lightweight setup that watches for incoming files, resizes them locally, and then uploads them via FTP or HTTP.

A Linux or Raspberry Pi solution would be especially interesting, but a mobile workflow could also work. I’d prefer not to carry a full laptop all day. What tools or workflow would best handle this?

user17201 · Answer

If you can set up your Raspberry Pi to listen on WiFi, my suggestion is as follows:

Install imagemagick on the Pi to get the convert utility.
Set up the Pi with an SSID and NFS/SMB/whatever shared folder to receive the images.
Script something in bash like for x in *.jpg; do convert -resize 50% $x; done. You can poll the folder on the Pi for changes, too, so you can execute this relatively quickly - see: this SE thread. Note that convert will resize the image in-place, so no pesky duplicate files to handle.
Execute your command of choice to push the images to your sshd/ftpd/httpd server right after the resize command finishes in the script.

nb. This is my first SE answer (although I've been reading photo.se for a long time, hope it's helpful.)

How can I resize and upload event photos while I’m still shooting?

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