Auto-Update Social/Blog Sites with IFTTT

chaselton

I'm surprised that no one has posted this before and I'm a little wary about posting it now...I'm afraid there's some directive that I didn't see disallowing use of this utility.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a free service in which you can configure "recipes" to auto-post your photographs to various targets...which are called "channels". They support Blogger, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, Pintrest...plus a bunch of others. I use it currently to auto-post to Twitter and auto-queue posts to Tumblr using SmugMug keyword feeds.

If you're interested, first sign up for an account, log in, and take a look at the channels available so you can decide which ones you want to use. Note: You'll definitely be using the feed channel.

Next, decide what keywords you want to use for your feed channel. I recommend choosing a word or words you have not used before so you can start with an empty feed.

Once you've decided on keywords, you can either start creating recipes right away or you can configure the "channels" you want to use. I used the former of the two options; channel configuration is part of creating the recipe.

When creating the recipe, you'll use the feed channel as the "if" part and you'll use the keyword feed URL to configure it. For example:
http://api.smugmug.com/hack/feed.mg?Type=userkeyword&NickName=[nickname]&Data=[keyword]&format=rss200
where [keyword] is whatever word you've chosen for that recipe.
Important Notes: parameters are case sensitive...size=XLarge is NOT the same as Size=XLarge. Also if you're using a custom domain, make sure you put &ForceDomain=true at the end of the feed URL (thanks to the SmugMug Hero that gave me that tip!).

Once you've created the recipe, you can test it by going to the gallery you want auto-post from and adding the keyword you've used with your recipe. IFTTT will see a new item in your feed, and handle it however your recipe tells it to.

It sounds more complicated than it really is; the site makes it very easy to configure new recipes plus there is a repository of pre-created recipes you can look through.

devbobo

GuyGG

Hey, this works nicely. I'd been familiar with IFTTT and used it for a few other things, but had a definite use for posting photos from SmugMug to Tumblr. One question. Anyone know of a way to get it to use the keywords from SmugMug to fill in the keywords on Tumblr? None of the listed RSS feed ingredients in IFTTT seem to include it. There is a media:keywords item in the RSS feed itself, but I don't see a way to reference that in IFTTT to fill in the Tumblr action keywords ingredient. It would be so awesome if that would work. Or, if there was an actual SmugMug channel for IFTTT...

GuyGG

Woah. OK, figured out how to make keywords cross over. It takes a bit of setup, but it works. You can use Yahoo Pipes to rewrite the feed. I chose to use the author field for my keywords, as the actual author field is useless to me for the process. You first have to rename the current author field to item.nothing so that the default nobody@smugmug.com entry doesn't get put in there when you have no keywords set on a field. Then, it's just a matter of renaming the media:keywords field as the author field. Here's a screenshot of the pipe flow for it. Then, just use the pipe feed url for the IFTTT trigger. During the action, set the ingredient for author to be put into the Tumblr keywords field.

chaselton

Nice! Very nice! I'll need to check that out.

Have they added multi-account support for Twitter and/or Tumblr yet?

--sent from mobile

GuyGG

As far as Tumblr, it still seems to make you pick which Tumblr account the channel in IFTTT is using. If they'd let you pick that in the recipe rather than channel settings, that would be much nicer.