Long offloads do not need watching. Stow can send a short notification to your phone the moment a card finishes, so you can be packing kit, having dinner or on the next setup while it works.
Alerts travel through ntfy, a small free notifications app. It needs no account and no sign-up: you pick a topic name, Stow sends alerts to that name, and your phone listens to it. The topic name is the only thing the two share, which is why Stow generates an unguessable one for you.
Setting it up
- Install ntfy on your phone. It is free: App Store for iPhone, Google Play for Android.
- In Stow, open Settings and find Alerts. Press Generate and Stow fills in a topic name of your own, something like
stow-x7qp2v. You can type your own instead; treat it like a password, because anyone who knows the name could see your alert titles. - In the ntfy app, subscribe to that topic. Tap the +, choose subscribe to topic, and enter exactly the same name. Same spelling, same case.
- Back in Stow, press Test. Your phone should buzz within a moment. That is it: from now on, every finished offload sends one.
If the test does not arrive
Nine times out of ten the two names do not quite match: check the topic in Stow's Settings against the one in the ntfy app, letter for letter. Beyond that, check the phone has an internet connection and that ntfy is allowed to show notifications in your phone's settings.
What is sent, honestly. An alert carries a short line of text, along the lines of the card name and that it finished, through the ntfy service. Nothing else about you, your computer or your footage travels with it. Alerts are off unless you set a topic, and clearing the topic box in Settings turns them off again.
Stow is free for macOS and Windows. If you have not tried it yet, the download is here.