default image and timelapse storage location

[d-maybour]

Thanks for this great project!
I would like to store my sky images and timelapse files etc on a USB flash drive instead of the uSD card filesystem. Is there a preferred way of achieving this, like a setting somewhere or creating a filesystem symbolic link?

[jimjackii]

@d-maybour
You can make a symbolic link /home/pi/allsky/images to a location you want.

I have the images on an NFS share. I created the symbolic link for it as follows
ln -s /mnt/data/allsky/images /home/pi/allsky/images

General is the command
ln -s /home/pi/allsky/images

[EricClaeys]

@jimjackii How do you handle updates to allsky? Is there any advantage/disadvantage of a symbolic link versus setting ALLSKY_IMAGES in variables.sh to your NFS share?

I'm starting to write an update.sh script that will fully update Allsky, saving current images and configuration files, then restoring the images and moving the prior settings to the updated software. It will need to handle symbolic links. I suppose if it just moved the prior "images" folder into ~/allsky, that should work.

[jimjackii]

@EricClaeys
Up until now I've always reinstalled directly from Git from scratch.

Then a few own adjustments in the scripts and the symbolic link for the pictures were added.

For the update script:
Specifying a symbolic link is of course more flexible - but requires a little knowledge of the Linux file system or NFS shares.

I would rather not integrate this into the update script and rather do it via the ALLSKY_IMAGES variable.

[EricClaeys]

@jimjackii Steffen, when I created the variables.sh file it was with the intent to make it easy to move various components of Allsky, like the images as you and some others do. However, it ended up adding yet another configuration file in addition to the three that already exist. It didn't work out as well as I hoped.

We will eventually move to a single configuration file which will allow users to overwrite the default locations.

[d-maybour]

Great, thanks guys for the answers and the intent behind the design. I'm up and running using a symbolic link that I can easily change as I experiment with different storage options.