CUCC Expedition Handbook

Uploading Photos

The end-result you are trying to achieve

What you are trying to do is to get your happy holiday snaps appear properly indexed with all the others from the previous decades of expo history. You can see them all here:
http://expo.survex.com/photos/
which is the end result. But all you have to do is to upload the photos to the right place. A hidden script does the hard work to make it all look nice after the upload.

If you are a beginner you can use the initial simple method below (using /uploads/ ) for the photos you have taken of cave entrances for cave survey and prospecting purposes. But please rename the filenames of the photos intelligently, e.g. "big-hole-near-path-to-fgh.jpg", or "2018-ad-07-entrance3.jpg" (rather than "DSC31415926.jpg"), and explain to an admin/nerd what you have done. Please use lower-case for all filenames.

If you are looking for how to upload a GPS track, those instructions have been moved to here.

Simple instructions

  1. Email a photo or two to someone who knows how to do it.
    (If you are doing more than a few photos, email will be clunky, so use another method).
  2. Use the Expo laptop in the tatty hut. Get someone to show you how to use FTP.

Beginners should always put all their files into the folder /home/expo/expofiles/uploads/ and ask an admin to move them to the right place.

Now go to using Filezilla initially - still using the Expo laptop.

More complex instructions

Using your own laptop on expo, or after you return from expo:

  1. Download and install Filezilla.
  2. Or learn to use scp.
  3. Or on a Windows machine try Winscp.
  4. Or if you are using an Android mobile phone, follow Radost's instructions which also cover Winscp briefly.

You do need to know the expo password.

Installing Filezilla

This software works identically on both Windows and Linux.

Filezilla is an "FTP client". This means that it connects to servers using a venerable service called "file transfer protocol" i.e. FTP. It looks a bit like copying files from one folder to another on your desktop but it works between different machines.

Using Filezilla initially

The expo website has a big section under 'home/expo/expofiles/' that is not under version control. This is dangerous as there is no backup. If you overwrite some important files with your holiday snaps then we are in big trouble. This is where we store big files that we don't want to keep multiple versions of which is why it is not under verson control.

So beginners should always put all their files into the folder 

/home/expo/expofiles/uploads/
and then ask an admin to move them to the right place. The configuration which you just did (if you followed the instructions) will set you up pointing at the correct folder automatically.

To make the admin's life easier, create your own folder in 

/home/expo/expofiles/uploads/
with your name like this: 
/home/expo/expofiles/uploads/YourName/
and put your files into that folder. ("YourName" should have no spaces, hyphens or underline characters.) So that the admin knpows who is responsible. And for goodness sake please don't upload lots of duplicate photos: cull them first to just the good ones.

Experienced users

OK the admin/nerd you have been asking to move the files to the right place is getting fed up and now wants you to put the uploaded photos in the right place yourself. This is where they go: 

directory: /home/expo/expofiles/photos/2018/YourName/
or, for GPS logs (GPX files): 
directory: /home/expo/expofiles/gpslogs/2018/YourName/

Obviously replace 'YourName' with your actual name (no spaces!). It is important that you get this right as this specific way of writing your name is standardised across the website (this is known as "CamelCase").

This is the only place in the whole system that you should use some capital letters. Absolutely everywhere else you should use only lower-case letters, no spaces, and hyphens (not underlines) when creating filenames, folder names or variable names of any sort.

Use the year that the photo was taken or the GPStrack logged.

Note that uploading photos does not automatically update the view at http://expo.survex.com/photos/ immediately. An update script needs to be run. This should run automatically once/day around midnight UTC (2017 and earlier) or a couple of minutes after you do the upload to the right place (2018 if Wookey gets this sorted out in time) but may be broken. Prod a web admin if nothing is updated by the next morning..

Experts only

If you have been using FTP since the last century or are particularly keen on doing everything using the command-line, read on.

Using scp

Works on Windows (using winscp), Linux (using scp), and no doubt mac and android with other tools. If you have Windows 10 and have installed bash, then you can use scp.

If you don't have winscp installed you can get it from here: http://winscp.net/eng/.

quick start guide: http://winscp.net/eng/docs/getting_started

screenshots: http://winscp.net/eng/docs/screenshots

scp gives you an 'explorer-like' interface (although winscp can give you a norton-commander-style 2-pane UI as well).

Using WebDAV

This no longer works as we had to change the folder permissions for /uploads/. Sorry.

Using rsync

No, don't use rsync for this. Really don't. It's too liable to delete everything or to overwrite files which are not changed at all because of the incompatibilities between Linux and Windows filename conventions (uppercase and lowercase are automagically converted and rsync gets it wrong).