While working on a project to automatically collect statistics on my Anki databases (stay tuned…) I worked out a system for scheduling synchronization from my desktop OS X machine.

Prerequisites

• LaunchControl is a GUI application that lets you create and manage user services on OS X
• Anki is a spaced repetition memorization software system

The solution relies on Automator. Normally, I don’t care much for Automator. It has too many limits on what tasks I can accomplish and workflows created with it are often fragile. However, in this case, we take advantage of its workflow recording feature. We’re going to record the process of opening Anki, selecting the profile to sync, then quitting Anki. This sequence of events ensures that the database on the local system is synchronized with the remote version.

Creating a new workflow

• Start Automator and create a new workflow document.
• Make sure that Anki resides in the OS X Dock because our workflow is going to look for it there.
• Click “Record” to begin recording the workflow.
• Click “Anki” in the Dock.
• After Anki launches, select the profile that you want to load. (I’m note sure whether you see this dialog when you have only a single profile. I have three so I see a dialog box asking which one to load. If you don’t see this window, just skip this step.)
• Anki will synchronize. When it is done, select “Quit” from the menu bar. Anki will sync again. Since we didn’t change any content this is an unnecessary step, but Anki does it automatically.
• After Anki has finished synchronizing, click the “Stop” button on the recording window.

Saving the workflow

You should now have an unsaved sequence of actions in the Watch Me Do group as above.

1. Save the workflow as a workflow first. This will allow you to edit the workflow in some way in the future if you need to.
2. Convert the workflow to an application. This will allow you to run it from the command line later on.
3. Save the converted workflow to an application file type. Name it anything you like. I called it ankisync.
4. Quit Automator

Allowing the workflow to control the computer

The privacy and security features on OS X may not allow you to run the Automator workflow from the command line without adding it to the list of trusted application.

1. Open the Security and Privacy section of the System Preferences
2. Click on the Privacy tab
3. Click on Accessibility in the source list
4. Drag the newly created workflow application into the list and grant it permission to control the computer.

This should be enough to allow the workflow to do its job.

Test that you can launch the workflow from the command line

1. Open the Terminal or iTerm depending on your preference. I prefer iTerm but Terminal is pre-installed on OS X.
2. Launch the workflow as follows:

$ open /path_to_your_workflow_app/ankisync.app

If this doesn’t properly launch your workflow, check that the everything is authorized properly in System Preferences.

Schedule the workflow to run using LaunchControl

• Add a new User Agent in LaunchControl by selecting User Agents from the job types list and clicking the + button at the bottom of the source list.
• Use the reverse DNS standard for naming your job.
• Drag a “Start calendar interval” item on the job.
• Configure the calendar interval according to the time you would like the job to run.
• In the text box “Program to run” add open and the path of the workflow application.
• Save your job and that should be it!

You should be aware that this relies on a somewhat fragile set of UI actions; but when it works, you’ll have a automated method for keeping your Anki collection in sync.

I use Anki to study foreign language vocabulary. It’s the de facto spaced repetition software for memorization.^[Yes, I’m aware that others exist. I’ve tried many but always have come back to Anki.] When making flashcards for language learnings, I try to use imagery as much as possible. So a card may have a Russian word on one side and just an image on the opposite side. (Since I already know the English word that the image represents, why not try to engage a different part of the brain to help with memorization?)

If you use Anki on multiple devices, then synchronization is a key step. However, image size becomes a limiting factor for sync speed. Since only a small image is often necessary to convey the intended meaning, we can improve the sync efficiency by using them while not sacrificing any meaning. Bulk, efficient resizing of images for Anki cards is an important part of the process for me.

Here I’ll describe a process of automatically processing images for use on Anki cards using Hazel and ImageMagick. Sorry, PC and Linux users, this is OS X only.

Hazel

Hazel is an indispensable tool for OS X automation. It’s a little hard to describe all of the things that it can do, but suffice it to say that it is a background application that watches folders and then performs rules on the contents of those folders. You will need to buy it for this process to work.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a well-known Swiss army knife of image process. You will need to install it which you can do using Homebrew or this installer

The process

I created two directories on the Desktop: ankibound and ankidone. Incoming images go into ankibound. The rule we create in Hazel will watch ankibound, convert the image to a smaller size, adjust the quality slightly, strip the unused metadata and move the processed file to ankidone.

Hazel rule to process incoming images

If you are not familiar with creating Hazel rules, you first add the folder to be watched (ankibound) and add a new rules which we’ve cleverly named “Resize images for Anki.” Then we just need to add the criteria and the steps for the rule.

We’ve specified the type of file to be processed inside of ankibound and added two actions:

• resize incoming images using ImageMagick on the command line, and
• move the processed images to ankidone.

The code for image scaling is simple, it’s just:

/usr/local/bin/convert "$1" -adaptive-resize 150x150 -quality 80\
 -density 72 -strip "$1"

Now, any image that you save to ankibound will get resized to 150px in its largest dimension and moved to ankidone, ready to import into your Anki cards. Of course, you could also use the ImageResizer add-on for Anki but I like being in control of my own process and being able to deal with images without having to get them onto the clipboard. Either way works.

References

• Automatic image resize and ftp upload with Hazel 3.1 - original inspiration for the methodology
• ImageMagick home page
• Adjusting size, resolution and quality using ImageMagick
• Using -strip option in ImageMagick to remove metadata
• Hazel - directory automation for OS X
• Possible alternative to ImageMagick - you could use sips on OS X in place of ImageMagick. It should work, but I haven’t tried it. From a brief glance, it doesn’t seem to support everything we are doing with ImageMagick, but I could be wrong.
• sips man page - this is the man(1) page for sips(1) on OS X.
• Anki ImageResizer add-on - another alternative leveraging the Anki plugin architecture