Upload tricks on a Mac
March 27, 2014 8:43 AM   Subscribe

For a while, I've searched for a quirky way to handle delivery of my files online - basically one video file, between 30 - 250 MB, gets uploaded to YouTube for client preview, and to Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) for delivery to put on air. I'd love a simpler, or more automated way, to handle this process on my Mac.

I've come up with half-solutions before, but maybe someone out there has a magic bullet for this admittedly niche problem. For a while I use an app called TubeUploadr that actually handled the Youtube portion pretty well, but it stopped working last year and no fixes were ever made.

My current workflow:

1. Export file from Adobe Premiere.
2. Open YouTube upload link on Safari, drop in file from Finder to begin upload. Video must be set to Unlisted.
3. Open Hightail Express, drop in file from Finder. Add email addresses (the same three email addresses 99% of the time), and send file.

This seems simple enough, but I have to do this sometimes multiple times per day, and I'm all about automation.

So here would be my ideal setup, or as close as I can get it.

1. A watched folder that would wait on export of the file from Adobe Premiere. The trick here is I want to wait until the file is complete, and can't have it attempting to upload a partial file.
2. That file is uploaded automatically to my YouTube account, and set to Unlisted. It can have just the filename at this point, no other information needed.
3. File uploaded automatically to Hightail, and sent to a default email address.
4. Ideally, a follow up email would be sent to my address, with links to the YouTube video and the Hightail link.

Any solutions, partial or alternate recommendations are appreciated. We currently use YouTube because once approved, the videos go into our public channel. Hightail is a paid account with unlimited storage, and has been a great service for us the past few years.
posted by shinynewnick to Computers & Internet (5 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: There's probably a more elegant solution, but I believe Keyboard Maestro + (Hazel or Applescript) would do the job.

Hazel or Applescript could probably watch the folder and wait until the New Thing in it stopped changing (e.g., "Last modified is more than 5 or 10 or whatever minutes ago"). Then Keyboard Maestro can kick in and do the uploading. You can script pages by looking at the elements on them, in most cases, and in a worst case scenario, you can tell the mouse pointer to go to a particular place on the screen, then click, and so on.
posted by brentajones at 9:01 AM on March 27, 2014


Best answer: Hazel can do the watching and can launch Applescripts and/or other items upon completion.
posted by unixrat at 9:13 AM on March 27, 2014


Best answer: You should be able to use googlecl for youtube upload automation. The script will be something like

google youtube post --category yourcategory--access=hidden --user=yourusername yourvideo
posted by plinth at 10:22 AM on March 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Yes, you almost certainly want Hazel, which has a free two week trial. I'm a mid-level nerd and all the high-level nerd blogs I read rave about it.

This is the kind of thing you can set up with Hazel. The article I got that from, on uploading podcasts, sounds quite similar to your question. And there are lots of guides around.
posted by danteGideon at 11:03 AM on March 27, 2014


Response by poster: Hazel looks fairly fantastic on a quick glance. I dabbled in Automator tasks a few years ago, but this seems like a robust alternative. On Windows machines at my other job, I've used AutoHotKey extensively to create layered macros, so I'll give this a try to roll my own workflow.

I re-downloaded TubeUploadr today, and the developer did fix the authentication errors, but that command line option directly from Google will be perfect. Thanks to all!
posted by shinynewnick at 6:49 PM on March 27, 2014


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