Seen by davep revived

Following on from the rescue of my photoblog, followed by the rescue of the original incarnation, I've been thinking that I should get into the habit of posting the odd image here and there again, when the desire takes me.

The problem is the workflow. The point and purpose of the last two incarnations was that I just had to take image, manipulate image, post image and then lots of other things would happen. As I've mentioned in the posts linked to here, and others here on this blog, it's much harder these days to achieve that seamless and frictionless workflow we used to enjoy during the rise and the peak of "Web 2.0".

So yesterday I decided on an approach that, while it's neither seamless nor frictionless (yet), it feels like it will work. So here's the plan:

• Take photo
• Manipulate photo¹
• In Apple Photos add a description to the image
• Export JPEG file to a Photoblog Inbox folder in iCloud Drive
• Later, when I'm at my desk, import the image into the photoblog
• Publish the updated blog

So, yeah, more manual steps are required, at least for the moment. I suspect though that if this works well I might be able to increase the automation involved and do it in such a way that I'm in control of the steps and services (or at least I'll be able to do it in a way that I can swap out a step should whatever service being be lost).

As an aside, for anyone who might have been following along with my experiments with GitHub Copilot: the import tool I link to above was written from a prompt. This, for me, feels like the ideal use for such a tool. Writing that script was going to be a chore, I wanted to get on with the bigger picture thing, so asking Copilot to write it while I attended to other things felt sensible and useful.

I'll likely tidy up the code soon, but for now what was produced works and it let me try all of this out in the time I had available on an otherwise busy Sunday afternoon.