For a long time, I’ve wanted to create a database of the movies I have. Because I have movies scattered around on various media, I’d like to be able to point friends to a site where they can see all the movies I have, and I can look up to see what media it is available on. In my case, I have a PVR, a PVR on the Mac, some DVDs, and movies I’ve bought off Google Play.
Eventually, I realised that Google Forms just saves to a Google Sheets spreadsheet and I could use this spreadsheet to find the location, or share a link to it so my friends can pick a movie. I also figured that I could somehow script the act of responding to the Google Form or otherwise populate the data, reading the list of recordings on my Mac PVR from the filesystem.
After a bit of searching around, I came across this Reddit thread, How can I use Python to submit a Google Form (or write to a response spreadsheet)? which suggested the easiest way to submit the Google Form. With a bit of Python magic, I created a simple script to read the files and folders in a directory, and submit them straight to the Google Form!
Read on to find out how!