iPhone/Andriod upload to Drupal for Preschool Parents

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catchlight's picture

Hi there,

I have a specific use case scenario that I am trying to solve the smartest way possible. We have a preschool where we'd like our teachers to take photos on a smartphone and upload them to our Drupal website rather than messing around with a bunch of SD cards! The catch here is that the images need to be completely private as it's a preschool. Ideally, parents would log into the website and see their kid in a gallery having a great time. I understand this is possible in Flickr but parents would still need to join Flickr and login twice. (?)

Has anyone solved this type of issue before? A similar use case might be a family website.

Brock

Comments

Part of the puzzle.

oneone's picture

Hi Catchlight,

I am able to embed private Flickr photos in my Drupal site using phpflickr (see: http://drupal.org/node/116586#comment-3381474 ).

This solves part of your problem.

To upload pics to flickr you can use an API (see: http://www.flickr.com/services/api/upload.api.html ). Difficult part will be including it in your Drupal site. I have no experience with this.

Good luck and keep us posted.

Oneone.

What about evernote?

martinc's picture

Have you considered the evernote module? http://drupal.org/project/evernote

Don't enable the fb and twitter feeds and make the posts private. you could even use the tag feature to write the child's name.

MartinC.

Evernote Android client

hughbris's picture

Great idea. I'm looking into this concept with Brock, and I wanted to start by searching for a good smartphone client. (If we use a service with a decent API, we can certainly write our own client tailored to our use case, but it's preferable for several reasons to just use an existing one.)

So I only have an Android phone, but I reckon most apps like this are almost direct ports of the original smartphone platform client. That is, I expect Android/iPhone/Blackberry etc interfaces to be almost identical.

The Evernote client makes it easy to add a photo note. The option is right there when you open the app. It takes you into a camera lens view, where you can press the shutter or cancel, and there are re-take and OK buttons after you've hit the shutter. OK (or cancel) takes you back to a note screen, where your photo appears within it. So there is also the option to add text, tag, add attachments, put the note in a notebook, or go back to the camera for more photos. You can also save or cancel the note.

So to take several pictures, you have two choices (it seems):

  1. Start a photo note → snap, OK → add photo → snap, OK (→ … etc) → tag → save
  2. Start a photo note → snap, OK → tag → save. Repeat

(I guess putting notes into a separate notebook could be considered interchangeable with tagging for our purposes.)

Putting aside what an API or Drupal can do with the slightly different results, the first option would be OK for batch tagging consecutive pictures of one child only. However, it limits the user to that workflow and we really need spontaneity. It doesn't allow tagging at individual photo level. The second option does, but is even more clunky.

Besides those workflow issues, the app doesn't seem to allow consecutive snapping. That is, "snap → snap → snap" without the "OK" + "new photo" fiddling.

The ideal workflow, recorded for future evaluations, is more like this:

  • Startup selections → snap → snap (→ … etc) → snap, OK → tag individual images (see below*) → upload

* The tagging of individual images needs to be quite efficient. Ideally, photos, or a selection of them, can simply be assigned existing tags. This would also work in reverse, so a tag or set of tags could be assigned to a photo (or set of them). I don't ask much ;P. (Hmm, afterthought: maybe the tagging is best done after upload with the Evernote desktop web interface …)

I mention the ideal interface and workflow because I notice there are quite a few unofficial client apps around. Perhaps someone knows of a smartphone app for Evernote or Flickr (or other) which is closer to this.

My next task will be to look at Flickr apps, and there seem to be several.

Thanks

catchlight's picture

Thanks oneone and martinc, these are both ideas that are worth looking into some more.

Can anyone else contribute? Here's our ultimate workflow.

  1. Teachers snap pics on a iPhone or Andriod
  2. Teachers tag and upload pics via phone
  3. Pics are uploaded to webservice and are completely private
  4. Parents login to Drupal website and access private galleries.

Has anyone played with Google Auth Module and Picasa? Is this a possible solution?

best,
Brock

check out VozMob

oseldman's picture

We saw an excellent presentation on http://vozmob.net/ from schock at a Drupal meetup in downtown LA a few months ago. He described that they receive text, photos, audio and video via SMS and save them to be edited and displayed in various ways. They have an install profile (info available at http://drupal.org/project/vozmob), so you can get a sense of what modules they use.

Not sure if this solution was exactly what you're looking for, but I figured I'd mention this cool project, just in case.

If all you want is to send

christefano's picture

If all you want is to send pictures by email and have them posted as nodes with whatever title, tags, etc. are specified in the email, using Mailhandler with MIME Router is not a bad approach. The syntax for Mailhandler takes getting used to, though.

If you want a more streamlined mobile experience, use something like Dropbox and Filefield Sources. Photos on the phone can be saved to a Dropbox directory that's also accessed by the server that's running Drupal (using dropboxd) and Filefield Sources can then be configured to look in that directory.

The first approach can be set up to run automatically. The second approach would need to be done manually.

An existing system tying Drupal and Evernote together

dboeger's picture

You should take a look at the post by Chris Shattuck:
http://chrisshattuck.com/blog/using-evernote-and-drupal-ultimate-bloggin...

Very cool integration of Evernote and Drupal. Not exactly what you're looking for, but a very good start.

+1 subscribing..

TechNikh's picture

+1 subscribing..

Private Photo's

catchlight's picture

An update on the project. The preschool have dropped the idea of uploading via a mobile device, so that simplifies things greatly.

Next challenge - getting private photos to display. oneone, does this still work with D6 and Flickr? http://drupal.org/node/116586#comment-3458190

Anyone else with some help on this, of course it would be greatly appreciated.

update to the update

hughbris's picture

[receives baton] ;)

Now that we're not using a mobile photo client, a solution is emerging. I'm writing a custom module to get this functionality implemented.

We've been able to retrieve private photos by patching the Flickr API module to include some extra settings. There's also a tool to help retrieve an authentication token from Flickr, which is what allows us to retrieve private photos. There's also a patch to disable caching completely to suit the requirements laid out here (privacy on a shared server, using flickr.com's bandwidth, plus testing).

The next pieces of the puzzle are:

  • to retrieve private photos by tag and by date taken (done, use a call to flickr.photos.search)
  • to associate one or more tags to a user profile (the tags will identify their kids, probably simply their names)
  • to create custom views accessible only to the user, which takes their profile's tags and uses them as parameters to show a private gallery (of their kid on that day)

I'm going to plug away at this. I'd appreciate any ideas you might have.

I have no reason to believe

oneone's picture

I have no reason to believe it wouldn't work.

Instructions are very clear and it should take you no time to test it out in a sandbox.

Good luck!

PS: I had trouble finding a way to put private pics in a slideshow. So, I can also suggest using the very simple XML Slideshow to grab private flickr photos and then displaying them in a sexy slideshow.

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