Building My Own Photography Automation System – From File to Website
📸 As a photographer, I spend a lot of time working with images not just capturing them, but organizing, resizing, naming, watermarking, captioning, keywording, uploading, checking for duplicates, and updating my website and blog.It’s a lot.
So I decided to automate it.
And today, I’m celebrating the biggest technical upgrade to amir2000.nl to date.
🧩 The Challenge: Uploading new photos meant repeating the same tasks again and again:
- Renaming files to clean, SEO-friendly formats
- Resizing and watermarking images
- Generating thumbnails
- Filling out metadata: keywords, captions, camera details
- Avoiding duplicates
- Updating both the live site and the backend database
- Uploading via FTP
- Testing every step after
🛠️ The Solution: One Pipeline, Full Control Over the past few weeks, I built a complete end-to-end system using Python, SQLite, and MySQL that now automates nearly every part of my publishing workflow.
🧠 main.py The Image Processing Core
- Selects images using a custom-built GUI
- Let's me enter subject, location, and target folder
- Renames files smartly based on camera, location, and year
- Automatically applies watermark, resizes, and generates thumbnails
- Captures EXIF and inserts everything into a local review queue
📝 review_editor.py Final Check Before Going Live
- Let me review captions, keywords, and all metadata
- One-click actions for Approve / Reject / Pending
- Tracks the original file name for matching RAW files and keeping metadata clean
☁️ db_uploader.py Go Live with Confidence
- Uploads to the MySQL database
- Publishes directly to my website via FTP
- Automatically marks files as uploaded to avoid duplicates
- Checks all filenames against used_filenames.json to ensure uniqueness
🔍 What It Looks Like in Action Here’s how it flows:
- I select a group of images at once, depends on the folder/suject.
- The system smartly renames each based on content
- It creates thumbnails and resized images instantly
- Captions and keywords are generated with help from a learning template
- I review and click Publish
- The site updates instantly, with zero duplicates
✅ Human-checked
✅ Live in seconds
🧠What’s Next? This is just the beginning.
Coming soon:
✨ Model Training – A custom model that learns from my edits to improve caption and keyword suggestions
📅 Smarter Timelines – Auto-grouping photos by city, event, or series
🗂️ Batch Metadata Editor – To help curate and reprocess my full archive of 32,000+ images
🖥️ See It Live:
💬 Join the Conversation If you love photography, process, or creative automation, I hope this inspires you to build your own system.
And if you're curious how it works behind the scenes feel free to reach out or follow along.
You can find the project in GitHub|anir2000.nl_image_automation.
There's much more to come.
Amir
Photographer, Builder, Dreamer
amir2000.nl
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