When i bought the last digital camera Canon IXUS 860 i had to choose between several flash cards on which the photos & videos will be stored. Of course i thought of the future so i’ve bought 4GB SD flash card.

I’ve been using the camera for a while now, and not even once erase or format it. All the photos are still on the card and somewhere, not organized, on my workstation (Search might find them :).

Last night i thought of an idea and today i’ve realized it. It cost me only 15EUR for internal card reader and few minutes of “hard thinking”. The plan is to build an automatic storage place on my little Linux Slackware PC, which i use as a server (no X or Gnome), to store photos/videos in organized structure (year, month, day) and make it possible to add additional users (backup for more digital cameras).

I’ve bought Akasa Internal CardReader(-Writer) 3.5-inch drive ((Supports MS, SD, RS, Ultra, SMC, ..)) at local tech store. The “build-in” was quite simple – just screw it and plug it on the motherboard (1min). The OS automatically installed the drivers, so it’s really “plug & play“, even on Linux (2.4.0+ kernel).

When the card reader was installed & working, i had to write a small PHP & shell script, so i could store data from the flash card to disk in the web browser. I won’t paste the whole code, just few important shell lines ..

mkdir /mnt/cards – i had to make a directory to temporarily mount data
mount /dev/flashcard /mnt/cards - mount flash media into directory /mnt/cards
find /mnt/cards -name “*.jpg” -exec cp -u {} /other-dir/backup/ \; – only JPG photos will be stored
umount /mnt/cards - of course i have to umount (Save Remove in Windows) the flash card

With additional work, you’re storage shall become pretty like mine. I’ve made a “smart” directory structure like ..

2008/
2008/04
2008/04/12/

.. so every day i “backup”, new directory is automatically made and the photos from flash card are stored into it. All this is of course done thru web browser. Nice, yes? :-)