A little while back, I noticed that Instagram stopped supporting its ability to post to Flickr… at least I think it did. I mean a lot of my pics from Instagram can be found on Flickr… But in any case, at this time there is no link between the two. And as I use Instagram whenever I don’t have my real camera at hand (I love the filters), and my website has a Flickr stream, I started to look for a way to connect them.
Now be forewarned, what I am about to present is a tool that can connect all your counts to each other, so be warned that you will have to yet again provide your credentials to a third party site. That being said, I came across IFTTT.org which is an abbreviation for If This, Then That. For instance, I created an applet that if I create a post here on my Blog, then it will post it to my Facebook Page Wall. Now if this posts to my regular wall and not my Matthew Koster – Server Administrator page I will be surprised due to the recent changes to Facebook’s sharing policy. And of course, since WordPress is already posting it to that page… there might be a duplicate entry.
This site is also the reason why you will see my Instagram photos posted to my blog, not only am I sending my photos to Flickr, but I have it published a post on my blog, which in turn, posts it to my Server Admin Facebook page. So when you think of it, once photo from Instagram ends up in 4 different places, 2 of which are controlled by IFTTT.com.
The site has a slew of support for apps across the board from the obvious Instagram, Flickr, WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter, but you can also send updates to your BMW if it supports it.
They have 512 possible services that you can link and interact with. And each service has many sub-options giving you hundreds of thousands of possibilities. You can even set it up to get a notification when your Uber driver arrives or send your Uber trips to a spreadsheet or iOS Calendar…
Now you need to keep in mind, these IFTTT apps are not run instantly, there are no push notification settings for when a post is made. Instead, it uses a pull method every hour, so time-sensitive material should be tested first before relying on it (Like SMS to BMW Screen).
Here is what I have set up for myself so far:
I have only tested the two Instagram applets and they do work fine, the Facebook applet, however, has not been tested. So i will see where this post ends up, be it on my Facebook Wall, or my Facebook Page Wall.
In any case, there are quite a few combinations I will be testing for sure.