Photoblogging…

I just got a Sony Ericsson P800 smartphone/cellphone/cameraphone thing and it’s turning out to not be as useful as I had hoped for photoblogging. For some reason I was under the impression that easy-to-use and free photoblogging software existed for Symbian phones. Turns out that’s not the case. If you want to do photoblogging in a simple manner from your phone you need to either have a full-Internet GPRS service contract (an extra $20/mo through T-Mobile) or pay $.30 for each photo you want to post online. No thanks.

Since this phone has Bluetooth I thought there had to be an easy way to get the pictures off the phone and onto my blog. I looked and asked around, and apparently no such software exists.

So I wrote my own. It’s not complicated, it’s just a perl script that takes a jpg, resizes it, copies it to a special location on my webserver and then creates a blog entry for it. In case anyone else is interested in this script, I put it online here.

Now, whenever I want to photoblog a picture off my phone, I Bluetooth it to my Mac and then run this script. Setting up Bluetooth File Transfer to automatically accept files and stick them in ~/Documents/Bluetooth elimates a step. If it turns out I’m really using this a lot I’ll change the script to detect changes to the Bluetooth directory and automatically blog photos that appear in it.

Lazyweb idea: Anyone understand the Mac Bluetooth API? I’d rather have a standalone program that does this whenever it receives a jpg file.

Leave a Reply