Looking for a snowflakey Android camera app

November 15, 2018 6:36 AM

I recently made the switch from iOS to Android, and I've been generally happy with it so far, but there is one important bit of my workflow that I can't seem to replicate. On iOS I used Bento Cam to take photos of a weekly work event that would 1) not get intermingled with all the other photos in my Camera Roll and 2) magically sync with a designated Dropbox folder. Bento Cam is not available on Android (and no longer in development), and I can't seem to find a suitable replacement. Any ideas?

To be clear, the essentials are:

1. Save all photos within the app itself and NOT to the phone's Gallery.
2. Without much (if any) interaction, send the photos to a Dropbox (or other cloud-based) folder that syncs to my computer.

I'm not super worried about image quality, filters, editing, or any of the other usual bells and whistles in third party camera apps.

I'm happy to do as much fiddling as I need to, and I'll even sideload something or whatever.

posted by Rock Steady to Technology (3 answers total)

Best answer: I would have thought either of the following would work:

• Find a camera app you like, configure it to save it's photos in its own folder under the "DCIM" folder in the tree. This is a "magic" folder that is assumed to contain photos/videos.
• Create a file in the camera's save folder called ".nomedia", this will exclude it from the gallery app and camera-roll like functions.
• Configure the official Dropbox app to auto-backup camera photos. As the save directory is in the DCIM tree it will see the new images and copy them.

Or

• Find a camera app you like, configure it to save it's photos in its own folder under the "Downloads" folder in the tree. This is a sort of no-mans-land where you can convince almost all apps to save to and load from.
• Create a file in the camera's save folder called ".nomedia", this will exclude it from the gallery app and camera-roll like functions.
• Configure the unofficial "more like real Dropbox" app "Autosync for Dropbox - Dropsync" to sync your camera's save folder. The Dropsync app is much more powerful than the official client, but as it is a 3rd party you may or may not want to hook it up to your account. It can handle various sync modes, allowing remote deleting or not depending on what you want.

For the camera app you may like Open Camera, you can change the save location in the "Settings -> More Camera Controls" menu and its pretty powerful, if not very pretty.

(I haven't actually tested any of this. I'm not sure of the ".nomedia" trick is officially supported, and the pictures aren't really hidden - anyone with the phone could load them via the filesystem if they wanted.)
posted by samworm at 10:16 AM on November 15, 2018 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Oh, wow, if that .nomedia thing works, that's pretty much perfect. I don't need the pics to be literally hidden, just not cluttering up my personal photos.
posted by Rock Steady at 5:14 AM on November 16, 2018

Response by poster: The .nomedia thing does indeed work! Thanks again samworm.
posted by Rock Steady at 8:54 AM on December 17, 2018