QGIS Automated photo import

You could definitely write a custom script to auto-download files from the internet or a network folder using cron (if you're a unix/linux user) or schtasks (if you're a windows person), which lets you execute scripts at specific times of day. For importing them into QGIS, you could use cron functions/schtasks cmdlets to execute a download to a folder and then subsequently execute another script to add it as a QGIS layer or whatever using the QGIS API for Python. There's also the QGIS network module that has the contentfetcher method for HTTP servers, but idk if that will work for your network folder since it is an HTTP protocol for getting data from a URL.

As far as having the option to do it manually, you would just want to save the script and make it executable so you could execute it from the terminal/CMD whenever you like. I've included the links to the cron, schtasks and QGIS network docs below, which should put you on the right path. If you don't have experience with scripting just yet, I'd start with the basics of a language that you can then use to solve solutions like this regularly instead of finding ad hoc applications - it's well worth the time.

If you add some more details like the programming languages you're familiar with, your OS, how you want to store your data (data layer, map document, jpeg, etc), you will get a lot more detailed and helpful answer.

https://qgis.org/pyqgis/3.0/core/Network/index.html https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/taskschd/schtasks