Photon Uploader (Apple Silicon)

A lightweight macOS menu bar app that watches a folder for new image files and automatically uploads them to your Photon SSH Container via SCP. After a successful upload, the URL is copied to your clipboard and a system notification is sent.

Requirements

• Homebrew
• fswatch — brew install fswatch
• openssl — brew install openssl

Configuration

Copy photon.conf to ~/Documents/Photon/photon.conf and fill in your values:

# Directories
DIR_TO_MONITOR="/Users/Jordan/Documents/Photon/tmp"   # Folder to watch for new files
DIR_TO_MOVE="/Users/Jordan/Documents/Photon/upload"   # Staging area during upload
DIR_ARCHIVE="/Users/Jordan/Documents/Photon/archive"  # Where files go after upload (if archiving)

# Server
SERVER="photon.example.com"
USER="photon"
PORT="2222"
REMOTE_DIR="/path/on/server/"
PHOTON_DOMAIN="photon.example.com"
BASE_URL="https://photon.example.com/share"

# SSH key
SSH_KEY_PATH="$HOME/.ssh/id_rsa"

# File handling
SUPPORTED_EXTENSIONS="jpg,jpeg,png,gif,webp,bmp,tiff"
CLEANUP_AFTER_UPLOAD=true
ENABLE_NOTIFICATIONS=true

# Performance
MAX_CONCURRENT_UPLOADS=3
UPLOAD_TIMEOUT=30

Building

./build.sh

This compiles both Swift binaries, assembles the app bundle, and installs the result to ~/Applications/Photon Uploader.app.

Regenerating the app icon

./create_icon.sh

Requires magick (brew install imagemagick). Generates Resources/AppIcon.icns from the source artwork and then runs build.sh.

Usage

Launch Photon Uploader from ~/Applications. It will start automatically monitoring DIR_TO_MONITOR. Drop any supported image file into that folder and it will be:

1. Renamed to a random filename
2. Uploaded to Photon via SCP
3. URL copied to your clipboard
4. Thumbnail generation triggered on the server
5. Archived or removed locally (depending on CLEANUP_AFTER_UPLOAD)

Use the menu bar icon to Open Log (~/Documents/Photon/photon-upload.log) or Quit.

Project structure

photon-uploader/
├── build/
│   ├── Info.plist               App bundle metadata.
│   ├── PhotonUploader/
│   │   └── main.swift           Menu bar app source.
│   │
│   ├── PhotonNotify/
│   │   ├── main.swift           Notification helper source.
│   │   └── info.plist           Helper bundle metadata.
│   │
│   ├── Resources/
│   │   ├── AppIcon.icns         App icon.
│   │   ├── MenuBarIcon.png      Menu bar icon (1x).
│   │   └── MenuBarIcon@2x.png   Menu bar icon (2x).
│   └── upload.sh                Upload daemon script.
│   
├── build.sh                     Build and install script.
└── photon.conf                Example configuration