I automated saving my kid's daycare photos

I can't unsee bad UX

As a product designer, bad UX pains me to my core. I can't unsee or un-experience the sea of mediocre apps and sites I have used. But until recently, I didn't have the time or skill to ship these improvements myself.

No bulk download and dozens of precious photos per week

My son's daycare posts photos to an app called Tadpoles. Each week I get dozens of photos dumped into a single feed. Tadpoles only lets you download one photo at a time, so I wanted his photos pulled out and saved to my Google Photos automatically, without manual downloading.

Six months ago, this idea would have been a nonstarter. I wouldn't have known where to even begin.

I shipped an automation pipeline

This time I built it. I just started, and the requirements revealed themselves one at a time: an undocumented API, OAuth tokens to manage, a face-detection model to filter out group photos, a weekly cron job, tests to prove the filter worked.

Claude Code wrote the code. I directed it and checked the results against what I actually needed. The final version logs into Tadpoles through an unofficial reverse-engineered API, runs an OpenCV face detector tuned against real test photos, and uploads matches to Google Photos every Sunday with no manual step.

Check it here: github.com/ericjwagner/tadpoles.

I'm not a software engineer (but wish I was). I used to be limited by how much Python I knew (aka none at all). Now, instead of venting to my wife about bad software, I can just fix it myself in a few hours.