Project 365 daily reminder

dennis · February 4, 2019, 6:18pm

I am trying to get myself to take a photo every day using a Project 365 calendar. What I would like to do is have a notification appear at a set time every day that shows me the calendar entry with the photo topic for the day, listed as an all day event. Then open the camera app.

I don’t want to edit all 365 entries to add a calendar alert, so I figured there might be a better method.

Any help is appreciated.

Dennis

Kaitlin · February 4, 2019, 8:41pm

Perhaps you could set up a Launch Center Pro notification each day, which, when cilcked would launch a Shortcut to check the calendar for the current day, display the topic as a notification and then open the camera? That would seem the most straightforward to me. The only issue I could see is that it would require tapping on the notification before you see the topic and open the camera.

You could also maybe use something like IFTTT or Zapier with something like Pushbullet, but I believe both of the calendar triggers are along the lines of “do this when an event starts” which probably is not what you want for an all-day event (which it sounds like these are). I imagine they would trigger at midnight and not be much help to you.

sylumer · February 4, 2019, 10:45pm

It actually sounds to me like the issue might be that you just don’t want to manually update 365 calendar entries rather than you wanting to find a different solution entirely. What if you could automate updating the calendar entries?

Here’s an approach to do this that you could take using the iOS Shortcuts app.

Use Find Calendar Events Where to retrieve all of your calendar events for your Photos 365 calendar. Just set the filters according to your needs
Feed that into a Repeat With Each loop to process each calendar event.
Within the loop, you would process each event individually (as a Repeat Item). This processing duplicates the calendar event by using the attributes of the Repeat Item variable and the Add New Event action, along with your standardised alarm time. You could specify that alarm time using for example “Repeat Item (Start Date) at 09:00” where the start date is set to just use the date and not any time. You can similarly specify the event to be all day if they are currently not.
After the repeat loop has completed, you can then use another Find Calendar Events action, set as before, but with an additional filter of “Has No Alarms” to identify the original events and exclude the new duplicates/replacements. The results of that find action can then be passed into a Remove Events action so that you are presented with an option to remove the original events.

This should give you an updated set of events within a minute or so - depending upon the speed of your iOS device.

I’d also like to suggest that if you took this approach, that you would run this at a small scale at first to assure yourself of the duplication process before you run any removals; though another option could be that you leave all events in place as they wouldn’t actually contradict one another.

Hope that’s another useful option for you to consider.

dennis · February 5, 2019, 8:52pm

@Kaitlin thanks for the ideas. I did accomplish it with LCP. However the camera opens, but doesn’t save the photo the photo library.

dennis · February 5, 2019, 8:56pm

@sylumer I did some of what you mentioned and could get one event to modify the date, so I am missing something along thee way.

Link to what I’ve got so far

sylumer · February 5, 2019, 9:14pm

You’re referring back to your original search. You want to refer to each item produced as the result of that search. That’s where you need to reference the special repeat item variable in your loop.

Something more like this…