dji-auto-upload

Plug in your DJI drone. Walk away. Footage shows up in your cloud.

My DJI Neo 2 doesn't have an SD card. Everything it records lives on internal storage, and there are only two ways to get footage off it: the DJI app, which does a slow Wi-Fi transfer to my phone that I have to sit and watch, or a USB cable. Neither is something I want to deal with after a flight.

So I stopped dealing with it. Now I land, walk inside, and plug the drone into my computer. By the time I've set it down, the new clips are already uploading to the cloud and the drone's storage is clearing space for next time. I don't open an app, I don't drag any files, I don't click anything.

That's the whole idea: plug in a DJI device, walk away, footage shows up in your cloud. It works the same whether your footage sits on internal storage (like the Neo) or an SD card (like a Mini or a Mavic). Either way the storage never fills up, so you never have to stop and clear it by hand.

Which DJI devices work?

If your computer sees the device as a USB drive with a DCIM folder on it, this handles it. That's basically the whole lineup: the drones (Neo, Mini, Air, Mavic, Avata, FPV), the FPV Goggles (their recordings land in the same DCIM tree, and yes, it picks those up too), and the Osmo Action / Pocket cameras.

Detection doesn't actually require it to be a DJI at all. It looks for DJI's USB vendor ID and the DJI / DJIMEDIA volume labels first, but the real backstop is just "is there a DCIM folder here?", so new models tend to work on day one.

One thing to watch: a few devices (some Osmo cameras) ask you to pick a mode when you plug them in. Choose mass storage / USB drive, not MTP. An MTP device doesn't mount as a drive, so nothing that watches for drives can see it.

What you get

• Plug and forget, on all three OSes. Linux watches with udev, macOS with a DiskArbitration agent, Windows with a Scheduled Task running a WMI watcher. Install it once and you never launch it again.
• Your cloud, your choice. Uploads go through rclone, so Google Drive, Photos, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, a NAS, whatever you already use. Setup just asks which one.
• Sorted by the day you shot it. Clips are grouped by recording date, so a single plug-in can fill several folders (or albums) if the footage spans days.
• You can't upload the same clip twice. Every batch keeps an .uploaded ledger. Re-run it, unplug mid-upload, whatever; it resumes exactly where it left off and never sends a file again.
• It won't delete your footage behind your back. Out of the box it removes nothing from the drone. Card-trimming is something you switch on during setup, and even then a file is only removed if the upload ledger proves that exact file reached your cloud. Telemetry sidecars (.SRT, .LRF) are only removed along with the video they belong to, and if the drone's clock looks wrong the cleanup is skipped entirely rather than guessing.
• Your laptop won't fall asleep on the job. "Walk away" is exactly when a machine decides to idle-sleep and freeze the upload halfway, so a run holds an OS sleep inhibitor until it's finished, then releases it. (Closing the lid still suspends, on any OS. Nothing is lost when it does; see below.)
• Try it before you trust it. dji-auto-upload run --dry-run prints exactly what it would copy, upload, and delete, and changes nothing.
• It tells you when it's safe to unplug. When the run finishes it ejects the drone and says so, instead of leaving you guessing mid-copy.
• You can watch it, and closing the window is safe. On Windows and macOS a progress window opens when a drone is plugged in, showing a live bar with speed and ETA; the offload runs in a separate process, so closing that window never interrupts the upload. On Linux (where the trigger runs as root, outside your desktop session) progress arrives as a desktop notification that updates in place. Every OS reports the outcome when it finishes.
• It tells you when it finished, on every OS. A desktop notification on macOS and Linux, a popup on Windows, and dji-auto-upload status always shows the last run's outcome. Telegram messages remain available and optional.
• It tells you when something breaks. The failure popup/notification carries the log path and the diagnose command; the run's outcome is recorded durably.

Quick start

One command. It installs Python and rclone if you don't have them, installs dji-auto-upload, and walks you through setup — including the plug-in trigger.

Windows (paste into PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/szilvasolutions/dji-auto-upload/main/install.ps1 | iex

macOS / Linux (paste into a terminal):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/szilvasolutions/dji-auto-upload/main/install.sh | bash

Answer the questions, plug in your drone. That's it.

pip install dji-auto-upload
dji-auto-upload setup            # interactive: rclone remote, retention, optional Telegram
dji-auto-upload install-trigger  # OS-specific auto-trigger (sudo on Linux)

Setting up rclone

dji-auto-upload doesn't lock you into one cloud. It uploads through rclone, which speaks Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Photos, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2, a NAS over SFTP/SMB, and ~70 other backends. You pick the one you want; dji-auto-upload setup just asks for the remote's name.

Install rclone (once):

Easy path (Drive / Dropbox / OneDrive / S3 / NAS). Run rclone config, choose "New remote", pick your provider, and follow the prompts. For the big consumer clouds it's a single browser sign-in. Click Allow and you're done. Give the remote a name (e.g. gdrive) and use that name in setup. In the config, a path template like DJI/{date} files each day's clips into its own folder.

Stuck, or using a provider not covered here? rclone's own docs have a step-by-step page for every backend: rclone.org/docs — Configure (for example Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive).

Not sure which to choose? Google Drive is the least-friction option and the one most people should pick.

Per-OS installation

pip install dji-auto-upload
dji-auto-upload setup
sudo dji-auto-upload install-trigger    # writes /etc/udev/rules.d/99-dji-auto-upload.rules

brew install rclone
pip install dji-auto-upload
dji-auto-upload setup
dji-auto-upload install-trigger    # writes ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.dji-auto-upload.watcher.plist

log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.dji-auto-upload"'

winget install Rclone.Rclone
pip install dji-auto-upload
dji-auto-upload setup
dji-auto-upload install-trigger

schtasks /run /tn "DJI Auto Upload Watcher"

Configuration

dji-auto-upload setup writes a TOML config to your platform's config dir:

Edit it freely; comments survive dji-auto-upload setup re-runs.

[remote]
name = "gphotos"
path_template = "album/DJI-{date}"   # {date} expands to YYYY-MM-DD

[paths]
# Where clips are kept on this computer while they upload. Empty = platform
# default. Use single quotes on Windows: in double quotes a backslash starts
# a TOML escape and the line is rejected.
stage_dir = ''     # e.g. 'D:\\DJI' on Windows, '~/Videos/DJI' elsewhere

[retention]
stage_days = 2     # delete local copies N days after upload (0 = keep forever)
drone_days = 0     # delete drone files older than N days (0 = never touch the drone)

[detect]
sidecar_extensions = ["srt", "lrf"]  # kept with their video, deleted only with it
strict_detect      = false           # true = only trigger on DJI vendor ID / volume label

[behaviour]
disk_headroom_mb   = 512
verify_after_copy  = true
delete_drone_files = false   # drone-side deletion is strictly opt-in (set during setup)
eject_when_done    = true    # eject the drone when finished, so it's safe to unplug
inhibit_sleep      = true    # keep the machine awake while a run is in progress

[notifier]
enabled = true
events  = ["start", "done_copy", "done_upload", "done", "fail"]

Telegram credentials live in a separate credentials.toml (chmod 0600). dji-auto-upload setup walks you through getting a bot token from @BotFather and auto-discovers your chat ID by watching for the next message you send to your bot, so there's no copy-pasting from getUpdates URLs.

CLI

dji-auto-upload setup              # interactive setup wizard
dji-auto-upload run [--device P]   # one offload pass (autodetects if --device omitted)
dji-auto-upload run --dry-run      # show the full plan, change nothing
dji-auto-upload install-trigger    # install per-OS auto-trigger
dji-auto-upload uninstall-trigger
dji-auto-upload status             # config summary, rclone reachable, telegram reachable
dji-auto-upload watch-run          # live progress of the current run (safe to close)
dji-auto-upload update             # pull the latest version and refresh the trigger
dji-auto-upload uninstall          # remove the trigger, and optionally config + staged files
dji-auto-upload diagnose           # write a support bundle to attach to a bug report
dji-auto-upload test-notify        # send a test message
dji-auto-upload prune              # manual stage prune
dji-auto-upload version

Just after a new release? PyPI is eventually consistent across its CDN, so update can briefly still see the previous version. Run it again a minute later rather than assuming it failed.

How it works

USB plug-in
    │
    ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Per-OS trigger                                │
│  Linux: udev rule → systemd-run                │
│  macOS: LaunchAgent + DiskArbitration callback │
│  Windows: Scheduled Task + WMI watcher         │
└──────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘
               │
               ▼
       dji-auto-upload run --device <volume>
               │
   ┌───────────┼───────────┬────────────┬──────────┐
   ▼           ▼           ▼            ▼          ▼
inventory   precheck     copy        upload     cleanup
 (group   (free space  (atomic     (rclone     (ledger-
  by mtime  + headroom)  .part →    --files-     gated
  date)               os.replace)   from)       prune)
                                       │
                                       ▼
                               .uploaded ledger
                                       │
                                       ▼
                              Telegram notification

See docs/architecture.md for the full state machine and docs/why.md for the bash → Python rewrite story.

What if the computer sleeps anyway?

While a run is active it holds a sleep inhibitor (SetThreadExecutionState on Windows, caffeinate on macOS, systemd-inhibit on Linux), so an idle machine won't suspend mid-transfer. That covers the normal "plug in and walk away" case.

It can't stop you closing the lid or choosing Sleep from the menu. If that happens mid-upload, nothing is lost and nothing is duplicated: files already confirmed are in the .uploaded ledger, and anything unconfirmed is simply retried. The drone is never trimmed for a file that isn't confirmed in the cloud. Replug (or run dji-auto-upload run) and it picks up exactly where it stopped.

Set inhibit_sleep = false if you'd rather the machine follow its normal power policy during a run.

Development

git clone https://github.com/szilvasolutions/dji-auto-upload
cd dji-auto-upload
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest                       # unit + integration
ruff check .
mypy src

The integration test (tests/integration/test_offload_pipeline.py) builds a synthetic DCIM tree, points the orchestrator at a fake rclone binary (tests/fixtures/fake_rclone.py), and asserts ledger contents, file placement, and notifier event ordering.

Support this project

This is free and I build it in my spare time. If it saved you the hassle of dragging files off a drone, or you want to nudge a feature along, you can buy me a coffee. Bug reports and pull requests are just as welcome.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Uploads are performed by rclone, which is a separate MIT-licensed program that you install yourself; this project runs it, it does not include it.

DJI, Mavic, Mini, Air, Avata, Neo and Osmo are trademarks of SZ DJI Technology Co., Ltd. This is an independent hobby project and is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by DJI. The name describes what the tool works with, nothing more.