Kid camp photo studio
Having running the photo studio at Minimünchen for the last few years, we always had difficulties connecting multiple windows and apple computers, displays, cameras and printer with no extra budget for soft- or hardware. In the beginning we just moved SD cards around between camera and computer but when we lost a camera due to broken pins by a reverse inserted SD card, we finally set up an own Wifi network — connecting an outdated fritz box to a on old macbook to an outdated Canon DSLR all firmly mounted on a mobile Plaubel stand.
Pictures could be accessed remotely via FTP server as the windows file sharing did not work due to missing admin passwords. Editing was done on workstations that were synchronized in regular intervals using a demo version of Lightroom. This worked but children of foreign nationalities had always problems to understand German LR menus (while the current cloud-based LR versions cannot be used anymore).
This worked on most days in 2016 but it was always a pain to set up so many computers with wifi, ftp, sync script, lightroom, printer, … and clean them in the evening. Synchronizing also took a lot of bandwidth as full resolution pictures were shuffled around. The central camera server had further timeouts as further remote camera pictures had to be uploaded via direct usb connection. Other workshops also needed pictures for download which had to be done at the same bottleneck – the USB port of the main camera laptop. Further timeouts were caused by searches for pictures from previous days as we had no possibility to mark pictures.
For this year, I therefore planned to avoid any remote client software installation using only a central webserver plugged into the camera as described earlier. So everybody can now upload, edit or download using highly optimized picture sizes (25kb for previews and 600kb for full size) mainly by clicking on icons.
The setup is available upon request including all binaries for OSX 10.7-10.13.