Here is an easy way to upload your photos taken by using RasPiCamcorder straight to DropBox. The problem is called Dropbox-Uploader, by Andrea Fabrizi.

A truly brilliant piece of work that gives you access to your DropBox account right from the command line.

You do have to jump through a couple of hoops to get it set up (security mostly), but once you’ve done that, it’s a breeze.

1. DropBox account

First of all you need a DropBox account. Hop on over to DropBox and get one – it’s free.

2. Download and Set Up DropBox Uploader

Next, you need to get Dropbox Uploader onto your Pi

cd ~ this ensures you are in /home/pi
git clone https://github.com/andreafabrizi/Dropbox-Uploader.git
ls

(If this fails, you may need to install git with sudo apt-get install git-core)

You should be able to see a directory called Dropbox-Uploader

cd Dropbox-Uploader
ls

You should now see three files, one of which is called dropbox_uploader.sh. This is the script we’re going to use.

3. Now the fiddly bit – API keys

Run the script with ./dropbox_uploader.sh (if it fails, try chmod +x dropbox_uploader.sh)

You should see this…

You then need to visit this link https://www.dropbox.com/developers/apps, login to DropBox and create an “app” by clicking the “create app” button.

Then choose “Dropbox API app”, “Files and Datastores”, and answer the final question “Can your app be limited to its own, private folder?” – either answer is OK, depending on your needs.

Then you need to give your app a unique name, and you will be assigned some keys to go with the name. Now you need to type in those keys here…

Once you’ve entered your keys and answered the question “app” or “full”, your Pi will request an authorisation token and you will be given a web URL you need to visit to activate it…

This is the part which annoyed me, as I was using a different computer to ssh into the Pi and couldn’t cut and paste the “rather tricky to type accurately” URL. But once you’ve got past that hurdle it should all just work. 🙂

If it works, you should see this in your browser…

4. Now you can use DropBox Uploader on your Raspberry Pi…

…from the command line like this…

cd home/pi/Dropbox-Uploader
./dropbox_uploader.sh upload /home/pi/name_of_upload_file name_of_upload_file

This will upload the file you choose to your DropBox account.

…or use it in a Python script like this…

And, if you look at the DropBox Uploader documentation, there’s a lot more commands you can make use of…

• upload
• download
• delete
• move
• list
• share
• mkdir

I think this is brilliant. Yes you have to jump through a couple of hoops, but to be able to take a photo and see it on my PC, phone or Nexus 7 tablet within 30 seconds is pretty darned cool. I’ll jump through a couple of hoops for something that cool.

Here’s what it looks like in action, taking a photo and uploading to DropBox automatically. The DropBox upload photo part starts at 5m 7s.

Update April 2015 – progress bar gone 😦

There is no longer a progress bar by default when you are uploading. This is a real shame. I installed dropbox uploader on a new setup and for ages I thought that it wasn’t working, when in fact it was just uploading a 30 Mb file and was taking about 10 minutes to do it on a slow connection.

I don’t know where the progress bar has gone, but it is sorely missed. I redid the “linking with dropbox” process 3 times, thinking it wasn’t working, before I thought to try a smaller file and found that it was working OK. Patience, and monitoring “top” for the curl command threw some light on things.

I’ve now found out you can put the progress bar back in if you edit the file…

nano /home/pi/Dropbox-Uploader/dropbox_uploader.sh

…and change SHOW_PROGRESSBAR=0 to SHOW_PROGRESSBAR=1

#Default values
TMP_DIR="/tmp"
DEBUG=0
QUIET=0
SHOW_PROGRESSBAR=1
SKIP_EXISTING_FILES=0
ERROR_STATUS=0

YAY! 🙂