Face it. You’re insanely busy. You have kids and you want to share your photos with your extended family but who has the time to actually upload pictures from a camera, print them out, put them in the mail, wait for the phone call from your parents that they received them, etc. Blah blah blah blah blah. You want to live your life, right?
Here’s how I took 3 different technologies from the internet, and slapped them together so that I can upload to instagram and share photos with my family, as well as send an email to my mom for her to see pictures of our daughter, all in 10 minutes, never to think of it again.
Enter, IFTTT.com. This site basically let’s you hook up different social media sites, utilities, even wifi enabled light bulbs to do things when other things happen. hence the acronym, If This, Then That. IFTTT.com Get it? Good.
Ok. So you will want to sign up for an account there.
I also am using Dropbox to store photos. When I take photos from instagram, they are saved to a dropbox folder. Dropbox has a paid and a free version, I think. I have it paid, they’re a good service. You should check them out.
In IFTTT you have these rules. I have two of them.
Rule # 1: If a photo on Instagram account “JammyLegs” is hashtagged with #Lucy -> Send said photo to Dropbox.
Rule # 2: If a Photo is put in a specific folder on Dropbox, (see Rule # 1) – > Send an email from aronoff(at)gmail.com
With me so far? Basically, your sending a picture to your friends on instagram and using their built in hashtag, which then sends it to dropbox then to an email… Now for the email part.
Sending the Email
The beauty of this, is that you write it ONCE. You write in what you want to say in the email and you then hit update… both of these are triggered, the hashtag in the Instagram post is all you need to remember.
You basically sit back, do what you’re doing already (taking photos on Instagram), and then every else gets the same pictures. No more printing, no more trips to the post office. You can now take a picture of your kid at the soccer field, add whatever hashtag and your grandparents can see it in almost real time.
Let me know in the comments how this works for you! And I love automation stuff like this, so share your recipes on IFTTT.com.
