My AI Photography Assistant: Instant SD Card to NAS Transfer

Today, I come home from shooting, slide my SD card into my Mac, run a single command, and within minutes I'm viewing photos on my phone.  But getting to this point took three years and an AI assistant.  

I have been shooting on a Fujifilm X-T20, an 8 year old camera. It takes wonderful photos and I have a great collection of lenses, but the mobile photo transfer experience, the Fujifilm Cam Remote app, was (and remains) frustratingly inconsistent and buggy. In 2023 it was replaced by the new Fujifilm XApp which does not support the X-T20. The hopes of a beautiful upgrade to my user experience were dashed.

Disappointing.

This pushed me to find a different approach. I wanted a faster, reliable, and automated way to share my photos and get them on device. In 2024 I started to move away from Cam Remote and turn all my attention to the Synology Mobile Photos app.  Not a great app, but functional and perfect for my needs.  All I needed was an app to view my photos and download them onto my iPhone.  

Previously, I had set up a Synology NAS to expand storage for my photography.  It was one of the best decisions I've made.  It simplified my life, allowing me to focus on the fun parts of photography. And yet, it was far from a frictionless process.

Initially, I tried to automate this flow with a couple of bash scripts. In 2024 I was stuck with this tedious 5 step process:

1. Insert SD card into Mac.
2. Manually copy/paste SD card contents onto Mac.
3. Run organize_photos.sh to organize.
4. Run sync_to_nas.sh to backup to nas.
5. Delete photos from Mac.

I was spared from the anxiety of running out of storage space so I thought complexity was a fair trade. I was going to simplify this even further, but professional and personal responsibilities pushed this down my priority list. I kept telling myself I'd fix this one day...

Three months ago I was using Claude, my favorite LLM, and began exploring the projects feature.  I created a project called "Photo Uploader" and uploaded my two scripts plus a text file of the 5 steps of my workflow.

I prompted Claude the following: "Based on the three files I provided, can you help me streamline my process of organizing and backing up my photos?" Claude proposed eliminating the manual copy step, handling all the transfer logic together, add error handling, check for successful backups, and add logging.

Beautiful! Everything I wanted to do.  Claude was reading my mind.

Claude provided me a new bash script with log(), check_sd_card(), import_photos(), organize_photos(),  sync_to_nas(), and cleanup()functions.

I saved the file, made it executable, inserted my SD card, ran it, and <drumroll> it failed.  

Not surprising.

I had to make tweaks in several areas.

1. The check_sd_card() function needed to check for a particular SD card name.
2. I needed import_photos() to look specifically for *jpg and *.raf files.
3. organize_photos.sh had to be updated to take arguments.
4. sync_to_nas() was checking the wrong directory paths.

These issues were fixed within a day, and suddenly I had a powerful new workflow without needing to spend precious time reworking my bash scripts. I just had to recall some bash knowledge.

The new workflow is just 2 steps:

1. Insert SD card.
2. Run photo_workflow.sh

It is a beautiful thing to come home after an exciting day of photography and have my photos on my phone in minutes.  My experience taught me something important: if you're stuck in a manual workflow, I highly recommend considering Claude to help you with automating it.  Whether you are starting from scratch or wanting to upgrade your workflow, there's no reason to put it off any longer.  What used to take weeks to build now just takes hours with AI assistance. It will give you back time to focus on the things you love.