Flask-based Samsung NX Camera Upload Server

This code is a re-creation of Samsung's Social Network Services (SNS), an API that allows to send emails and social media posts from WiFi-enabled Samsung cameras (including Samsung NX, WBxxxF, ...). As the hostnames are hardcoded in the cameras, DNS redirects are needed to deploy this re-implementation.

You can:

• send emails
• post to mastodon
• store to a directory on the server (and use inotify for further processing)

More information about the project can be found in:

• Blog post: Samsung NX camera to Mastodon bridge
• Talk (video and slides): Samsung Camera to Mastodon Bridge

This code is using Flask, but as the Samsung cameras are not fully compliant with the HTTP standard, we need to apply a minor fix.

For flask 2.x.x, flask-2.diff will "fix" the case-insensitive fileName field for email upload and accept the missing multi-part end boundary.

For flask 3.x.x, flask-3.diff will also accept the missing multi-part end boundary and additionally remove the dot stripping and IDNA conversion on cookie domains.

Supported models

The following camera models (generations) support sending e-mails or uploading files (see Samsung WiFi Cameras for details on the compacts):

• ST1000: doesn't work, using unknown API
• EX2F, ST200F, DV300F: working
• WBxxxF: see camera table
• NX mini (M7MU): working
• NX1000 (DRIMeIII): unknown
• NX30, NX300(M), NX310, NX2000 (DRIMeIV): working on NX300, should work on the other models
• NX500, NX1 (DRIMeV): working on NX500, should work equally on NX1

NX mini issues: this used to be unreliable before the NX mini hotspot detection was fixed.

Supported sharing services

Tested on NX300, NX mini and NX500:

• Email
• Facebook
• Picasa

Not supported (services are using an OAuth authentication flow that is not reverse-engineered yet):

• SkyDrive
• Flickr
• Dropbox

Configuration

Email

To send emails, you need to configure an SMTP (smarthost) account in config.toml. All photos sent from the camera's "Send email" function will be sent accordingly, unless you define a different action for an address.

For email addresses, the supported actions are:

• email (default)
• store
• mastodon
• shell

See below for an explanation of the action values.

Social Media

Photos and videos sent via any of the supported emulated social media services will be stored under a subdirectory of the UPLOAD_FOLDER. A different action can be defined:

• store (default)
• mastodon

See below for an explanation of the action values.

Mastodon

Using the login script

After installation, run the login script with the Mastodon server domain as a parameter:

source ./venv/bin/activate
./mastodonlogin.py https://photog.social

The script will print the Authorization page URL of your Mastodon instance, which you need to open in the browser. It will ask for a write permission for posts and media, in order to submit new posts.

After authorizing the app, you will see an "authorization code" that you need to paste back into the waiting mastodonlogin script.

The script will create a file mastodon.secret containing the server domain, the client secret and your user token. Please ensure that config.toml contains a reference to the file in the [MASTODON] section as TOKEN=mastodon.secret (the BASE_URL can be either omitted, or it must match the domain in the secret file).

You can create multiple secret files for different instances and use action instances to post on different accounts.

Manual configuration (alternative)

Go to Settings / Developer on your Mastodon instance, and create a new application. You only need to allow write:statuses and write:media.

Please call it "samsung-nx-emailservice" and link to this repositroy.

Once created, you can copy "your access token" into the TOKEN variable and the server domain into BASE_URL in the [MASTODON] config section.

Mapping services to actions

It is possible to override what happens with uploaded images, based on the service chosen in the camera or the recipient email address.

Some cameras, like the NX500, only support sending emails. With the mapping mechanism it is possible to define custom email recipient addresses to instead post images to Mastodon or store them on the server.

Actions

The action method is meant to launch different actions based on which social network or recipient email address you select on the camera.

You can define trigger email addresses like mastodon@example.com to make Mastodon posts from the "send email" menu on cameras that don't support social networks, like the NX500.

You can also use "facebook" to store files on the servers and "picasa" to call an external script.

Some actions can also have instances, separated by a ".". Each instance corresponds to a dedicated configuration block. The instance configuration inherits the full default configuration!

For example, "masto@mydomain.com" = "mastodon" will catch emails written to "masto@mydomain.com" and create a Mastodon post using the default instance configured in [MASTODON], whereas "masto-public@mydomain.com" = "mastodon.pub" will use the Mastodon instance configured in [MASTODON.pub].

See below for the action values.

email Action

An email will be sent via the smarthost, using the camera-supplied From address, To address, Subject, and message body.

Currently, no instances are supported for email.

store Action

All uploaded files will be stored under a subdirectory of the UPLOAD_FOLDER. The subdirectory will be the HMAC-SHA256 hash of the username, protected by SECRET to prevent guessing.

The respective directory can be monitored using inotify to implement further processing (inotifywait -q -e close_write -r $UPLOAD_FOLDER).

If an instance is specified, the instance name will override the destination folder name under UPLOAD_FOLDER.

mastodon Action

Files uploaded using this action will be converted into a Mastodon post.

You must define alt-text for all images and videos. For social media, this is technically required because the camera does not tell in advance how many files are to be expected. For emails, this is used to help visually impaired people. Alt-text must follow the body, separated using the tilde character.

For example, the message body "Holiday shot!~fancy flower bed~traffic sign" must be accompanied by two photos, and will be posted as follows:

Holiday shot!

📷️ <camera model if supplied by camera>

<content of config variable MASTODON_POSTSCRIPT>

Image 1: fancy flower bed

Image 2: traffic sign

An instance specifies a dedicated configuration block that can override individual options.

shell Action

It is possible to call external commands as an action. By default, the store action will be executed first, creating the uploaded file(s) on disk.

After that, the command specified as CMD will be executed in a blocking fashion, for each uploaded file individually.

If the STDIN variable is defined, its content will be passed to the command's standard input.

The config variables can use the following placeholders:

• {sender} - the sender email address (camera config)
• {recipient} - the recipient email address
• {filename} - the absolute path to the uploaded file
• {subject} - the email subject
• {body} - the email body

An instance specifies a dedicated configuration block that can override individual options.

drop Action

Ignore the respective email recipient / do nothing.

Action example

To redirect all photos uploaded to "Facebook" or sent via email to "example@mastodon.social" to Mastodon, and to only store photos sent to "store@example.com", you need to define the following three actions:

[ACTIONS]
facebook = "mastodon"
"example@mastodon.social" = "mastodon"
"store@example.com" = "store"

Installation

1. Change the path, secret and email / mastodon settings in config.toml

2. Add your email server credentials to config.toml

3. Install the virtual environment, patch flask, and run the (development) server:

python3 -m venv venv
source ./venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
patch -p1 < flask-3.diff # for flask 3.x.x
sudo python3 samsungserver.py

3. Forward incoming traffic on port 80 to the server (running on *:8080 by default)

4. On your camera, add the IP of your server to /etc/hosts:

192.168.1.23   gld.samsungosp.com www.samsungimaging.com www.ospserver.net snsgw.samsungmobile.com
# For ST200F and WB850F also add this:
192.168.1.23   www.yahoo.co.kr
# For WB35F, WB36F, WB37F, WB1100F also add this:
192.168.1.23   www.msn.com

NX1/NX500

You can directly write to the root filesystem on DRIMeV cameras:

mount / -o remount,rw
echo "192.168.0.11 gld.samsungosp.com www.samsungimaging.com www.ospserver.net snsgw.samsungmobile.com" > /etc/hosts
mount / -o remount,ro

NX300/NX30/NX2000

The DRIMeIV cameras have a read-only rootfs that gets reset on restart. You need to put the hosts file onto the SD card and copy it to /etc from autoexec.sh:

mount / -o remount,rw
cp /mnt/mmc/hosts /etc
mount / -o remount,ro

Custom DNS server

You can add the DNS entries to your local / custom DNS server. It is not advised to run a public resolver though!

You can either add the names to the global /etc/hosts file or have a custom file like /etc/hosts.samsungnx which you need to inform the DNS server about.

dnsmasq

Add your custom hosts file to dnsmasq as follows:

dnsmasq ... -addn-hosts=/etc/hosts.samsungnx

No support for other camera models

The firmware for other models must be patched to replace the hostname. So far, no reverse engineering efforts have been made to understand the logic and to be able to change individual parts.