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kidsnoter

kidsnoter is a tool for downloading and organizing albums from Kidsnote, a popular childcare communication platform.

👶 Motivation

My children attended a daycare which uses kidsnote.com to communicate with the parents. The daycare posts a ton of albums with loads of images but I saw no way to take them out - that's no good. Losing years of photo and video memories just because your children change daycare (or grow up) is a scary thought. Therefore I wrote this tool that can be run once or continuously to download all albums and save their descriptions for future smiles.

Features

  • Automatically downloads highest fidelity photos and videos from Kidsnote.
    • Smartly skips files that do not require replacing.
  • Organizes photos and videos into a structured directory hierarchy:
    • $CHILDNAME/$YEAR/$MONTH_$ALBUMID_$ALBUMNAME
  • Generates Markdown files with album information so that full title and description is preserved.
  • Docker support for easy cross platform deployment.
    • But does not require Docker to run.
  • Different verbosity logging levels.
  • Instrumented with Prometheus for dashboards and alerting.
  • Good API citizen with limited concurrency, exponential backoff and random jitter.

🚀 I AM NOT TECHNICAL, JUST TELL ME HOW TO RUN THIS

Installation Guide for Windows Users

If you're not familiar with technical setups, follow these steps to get kidsnoter running on your Windows computer:

1. Install Docker Desktop

  1. Download Docker Desktop for Windows from the official website: https://www.docker.com/products/docker-desktop
  2. Double-click the installer file you downloaded (probably named "Docker Desktop Installer.exe").
  3. Follow the installation wizard:
    • If asked, ensure the "Use WSL 2 instead of Hyper-V" option is selected.
    • Keep all other settings at their default values.
  4. Click "Ok" to start the installation.
  5. Once installation is complete, click "Close" to finish the installer.
  6. Docker Desktop will start automatically. You may see a popup asking for permissions; click "Ok" to allow Docker to make changes.

2. Create Necessary Folders and Files

  1. 📸 Create a folder for your albums:
    • Right-click on your Desktop
    • Select "New" > "Folder"
    • Name the folder "albums"
  2. ⚙️ Create a configuration file:
    • Right-click on your Desktop
    • Select "New" > "Text Document"
    • Name the file "config.yaml" (make sure to change the extension from .txt to .yaml)
  3. Edit the config file:
    • Right-click on "config.yaml" and select "Open with" > "Notepad"
    • Copy and paste the following into the file: 
      username: your_kidsnote_username
password: your_kidsnote_password
album_dir: /data/kidsnote
    • Replace your_kidsnote_username and your_kidsnote_password with your actual kidsnote.com login details.
    • Save the file and close Notepad.

3. Run kidsnoter

  1. Open "Command Prompt" (you can search for it in the Start menu)
  2. Copy and paste the following command, then press Enter:
docker run -v %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\config.yaml:/config/config.yaml -v %USERPROFILE%\Desktop\albums:/data/kidsnote ghcr.io/karolistamutis/kidsnoter:latest download-albums -vvv
  1. Wait for the command to finish, depending on amount of photos and your Internet connection speed it may take up to a few hours or more. You should see content appearing in the albums folder you've created on your Desktop earlier as it runs.

🖥️ Installation for Nerds (no Docker)

  1. Ensure you have Go 1.22 or later installed:
go version
  1. Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/karolistamutis/kidsnoter.git
cd kidsnoter
  1. Build the binary:
make build
  1. Create a config.yaml file in the project root:
username: your_kidsnote_username
password: your_kidsnote_password
album_dir: /path/to/save/albums
sync_interval: 12h
  1. Check that it works by listing your children
./kidsnoter list-children
  1. Run once or keep the process to sync periodically according to sync_interval

Once:

./kidsnoter download-albums

Continuous:

./kidsnoter serve

The commands above are equivalent, I've implemented serve specifically for running within Docker because Cronjobs or Systemd timers are not a good fit there. Feel free to run just download-albums with Cron or Systemd if you so wish!

If you will run within Docker, expose port :9091, you'll be able to scrape /metrics Prometheus endpoint.

⚙️ Environment variables

The following environment variables can be used to override config.yaml settings. You can also skip having config.yaml with the below set:

Commands

  • list-children will list children under your account.
  • list-albums will list all albums for all children.
    • given --child-id or --child-name will limit to a single child.
  • download-albums will download all albums for all children.
    • given --child-id or --child-name will limit to a single child.
  • serve will download all albums for all children and repeat the process according to sync_interval config parameter.

Commandline flags

  • -v or -vv or -vvv or -vvvv for most verbose log output
  • --overwrite bool flag for serve or download-albums to always download files and rewrite album descriptions.

Contributing Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the kidsnote.com team for their platform.

This project is not officially affiliated with or endorsed by kidsnote.com.