
Ask HN: What is one boring task you automated? - throwawayt856
and how you automated?
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aphextim
I work at a construction company where they may have 15-30 projects active at
any time ranging from 1 month to 3 years. On these projects the site
superintendent is responsible for taking a minimum of 10 photos a day.

It was my job to take all their photos and rename them based on the date
taken, resize them and store them by week ending date. I am working with
construction guys and not computer experts so I set up a system with their
phones/shared folders to easily allow them to drag/drop new photos into our
file-server.

I do not know how to program directly, but found a nice utility called DropIt.

[http://www.dropitproject.com/](http://www.dropitproject.com/)

This utility allows me to take a batch/folder of photos and automatically
rename them based on metadata I choose and output the results to another
folder. I chose date taken. This can rename 500 photos at once to the date
taken fast and easy.

I then take the files that have been renamed and reduce them in size using
another software called Caesium.

[https://saerasoft.com/caesium/](https://saerasoft.com/caesium/)

This one allows me to take a folder of photos, specify a new output and I can
typically get 90-95% reduction in file size while retaining the quality
needed.

Taking it one step further using the folder replication in DropIT, I have it
set so when a Superintendent drops photos into the shared folder on the
network, it locally replicates those files into a folder on my computer - then
drop it scans once and hour - if it finds photos in said folders it will then
automatically rename it to the output for me.

The only thing I manually have to do is run Caesium, which is auto configured
to scan/pull from the output folders of drop it and place back on the file-
server.

My Mondays used to literally be photos all day, doing this manually with the
way they showed me - now I can do all photos on all jobs in about 30 minutes
(after the initial configuration).

