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Michael David Murphy
Photographer, Writer, Digital Director for Atlanta Celebrates Photography.

Roll Your Own “iCloud for Video” using Image Capture, Hazel & Google Photos

You probably shoot a lot of video on your iPhone, and after that, who knows, right? Where do you store your videos? How do you organize them on your hard-drive, or view them from a mobile device?

This solution works well for me, based on a few presuppositions:

  • I don’t want to use iCloud
  • I enjoy using multi-use products for singular uses: Lightroom for stills but not video; Google Photos for video and not stills
  • I don’t want to store video on my phone, because there are never enough GBs
  • Creating a mobile-browsable solution for “cloud-based” video on an iOS device is ace

I use Hazel & TextExpander for nearly everything I do at work or at home, and they’re both exceptional for automating the kinds of tasks that are too stupid for humans to do manually.

In this example, I’ve set-up Hazel to watch a folder (Camera_Offload) for incoming video, and to date-stamp the incoming video filename from “IMG_2833.mov” to the more unique and sortable “20151119_IMG_2833.mov”.

After renaming, Hazel moves the file from my local machine to a large external drive, where it will live out its days in a stable, date-based file/folder hierarchy.

Google Photos (desktop uploader) is set-up to watch the file/folder system on the external drive, and to upload anything that’s new to Google Photos. While using Google Photos for still photographs is apparently the thing, using it for “video only” makes a lot of sense:

  • I never forget whether I’ve shot a video or a still of a particular scene, so I’m always looking for one or the other, not both at the same time
  • If I’m looking for a video, I never want to be scrolling through hundreds or thousands of other stills. I only want to see video when I’m looking for a video (and vice-versa, with stills)
  • Google gives you unlimited storage if you choose to upload downsampled video, which is fine, because you have the original(s) backed-up on your drives at home. You don’t want to stream 4k video of your cat on your phone, anyway. #overkill
  • Privacy: everything you upload to Google Photos can be/is marked private, and you can generate share-links quickly and easily, on an as-needed basis
  • I have no idea if this is true, but I’d hazard a guess that the back-end of what processes, houses, and plays your videos on Google Photos is no different than what processes, houses and plays videos on YouTube. YouTube works well for video, right?

One of the few drawbacks of this system is that video files do not contain the same EXIF metadata as your photos, so all of the great sorting and learning that Google can apply (and take) to/from your images does not transfer to this workflow. It’s hardly a deal breaker. I don’t need Google’s EXIF-smarts about my videos, I just need an easy-to-see grid of video that’s privately accessible to me from wherever, whenever.

And there’s currently no “embed code” to quickly embed a video hosted on Google Photos like the one above, which is a small annoyance.

On the plus side, if you use Google Chrome (rather than Safari) on iOS, you’ll stay logged-into photos.google.com in a way that makes it feel like a true mobile video viewing app.

Now I think about it, this solution is more like creating your own, private YouTube than replacing iCloud. Ok, then!

Questions? Hit me @whileseated on twitter.