Automating a Smart Bird Feeder's Photo Archive with Kubernetes and Immich

My Bird Buddy smart feeder takes a photo every time a bird visits. Over a few months, that adds up to thousands of images — all sitting in Bird Buddy’s cloud app with no good way to search, organize, or back them up. I wanted them in Immich, my self-hosted photo library, organized by species and properly timestamped. The Bird Buddy app doesn’t have an export feature. But the pybirdbuddy Python library can authenticate to their API and walk the feed. So I built a two-stage pipeline: a CronJob that downloads new photos daily, and a second CronJob that syncs them into Immich. Both run in Kubernetes, and the whole thing is about 300 lines of Python. ...

July 16, 2026 · 5 min · Rusty Bower