cfinke / clockback

Clockback is the Web frontend and upload script for a basic open-source Timehop replacement.

Clockback

Clockback is the Web frontend and upload script for a basic open-source Timehop replacement.

How to Use Clockback

Clockback consists of two parts: a single-page Web app that displays your photos from years past and a BASH script that uploads a week's worth of photos to your server.

To set up the Web app:

1. Upload the contents of the webapp/ folder to your Web server. Let's say the public URL of this folder is example.com/clockback/
2. Update the timezone option in config.php to match your local timezone.

To get your photos uploaded:

1. You'll need to get your photos named and organized in such a way that their filenames all begin with the date on which they were taken. I do this by managing all of my photos in iPhoto and then using iPhoto Disc Export to create an HTML-based export of the library. This results in a single folder that contains all of the photos from my library, and all of the filenames begin with the YYYY-MM-DD format date of the date they were taken. For the next step, we'll assume this folder's path is /path/to/photos
2. Run ./bin/upload.sh on your computer at least once per week to collect photos from /path/to/photos and upload them to example.com/clockback/photos/. upload.sh takes a number of arguments:
   1. -p: The path to your photo folder. In this example, it would be -p /path/to/photos
   2. -u: The upload path for your server. In this example, it would be something like -u example.com:~/clockback/photos/
   3. -t: The timezone to use for determining today's date. Macs, for example, use UTC on the command line by default, but you probably want the script to use your local timezone. Example: `-t "America/Los_Angeles"

To use Clockback:

1. Open example.com/clockback/ and save it to your homescreen on your phone (or bookmark it on your computer).
2. The end. Now you have an app that behaves like Timehop but for all of your photos, and without sharing your photos with a third party. At midnight every night, it will begin showing photos from the next day, as long as you've run bin/upload.sh in the last week, and it will automatically remove old photos so they don't take up space on your server.

Attributions

The icon was designed by icon 54