A few weeks ago I finally finished a long-standing project: converting all my photos on Typepad over to my personal photos site. When I first looked at converting my old blog to this one, I figured I’d be able to automate it all using existing tools. Well, not quite. It took some customization of an existing script to load a Typepad blog export into this blog’s Typo database. I have some Ruby and Rails experience so this was just a matter of learning Typo’s Rails model; your mileage may vary.

That was the easy part though. Next up was photos. Unfortunately, Typepad doesn’t have any photo export service. Perhaps this is due to a lack of standardization, but I ended up coming up with my own crude data format as well as a ruby script for exporting the photos, titles and captions. It uses a Ruby Web Application Testing API to actually click through a browser and download the relevant data. Basically it’s like having a robot sit at your computer and perform thousands of mundane copy/paste/download operations in a browser.

In order to run it, you will need to install Ruby and Watir.
Chances are, you’ll probably need to know a bit of Ruby, too, but I tried to design it so it’s self explanatory. Hopefully it’s just a matter of installing those packages and running the script.

The previous script simply downloads all those photos/titles/captions to your computer. Now how do you load them into your new, preferred online photo organizer? Well, that depends. If you’re using Gallery, you can use my script! Actually, you’ll still have to create the albums and upload the photos manually, but hopefully that’s not too painful a process. I had about 20 to move and it wasn’t all that bad, even for me, and I DESPISE repetitive, mundane computing operations. Why be a robot when you can build your own robot?

However, manually re-adding all those photo titles and captions would surely drive you to insanity, so just run this script instead. Even if you’re not using Gallery the code will be a good first step towards importing the data into your photo service of choice. Happy converting!