A few weeks ago I spotted this blog post on the Mozmonkey Blog about a mashup that could scan your Flickr feed for tags and post a link on your Twitter stream. I also noticed Twitpic a new Tumblr like photo blog that posts uploaded images to Flickr. Naturally, I was eager to merge my two favorite web apps.
If you have a cameraphone, smartphone or iPhone you probably have a data plan and are likely used to taking photos, text messaging and emailing from your mobile device. Chances are that those features tend to make work take over your life. At the same time tools like twitter and Flickr and the little camera in your phone let you steal back bits of your life and free time by letting you communicate, and interact with friends and acquaintances easily wherever you are.
We at Twelve Horses are also pretty big fans of Flickr for it’s great social / interactive features and it’s HUGE support in the development community. It has a lot of great features, and the more you dig the more useful they get. One I really like is the email to upload. This feature lets you send photos to your flickr stream by attaching them to an email. The subject line becomes the title and any body text becomes the description copy. You can also specify tags that get assigned to all emailed photos. I’ve used this feature to upload photos from bike races or various adventures on the fly and even forward them to my blog in order to have real-time remote blog-reporting.
So I got to thinking…
With Twitterfeed.com and the fact that you can’t post a picture of yourself swinging a dead cat on Flickr without hitting an rss feed, I set out to find a way to get ‘er done w/o learning php, changing business models or calculating billable efficiencies.
How to post photos to flickr and twitter from your mobile phone (or email)
Step One:
Set up email uploads to your Flickr account. You can also set up another email address that will post the photo and caption text to your blog as well. Have that email add a unique tag, like cameraphone, or dailyphoto, or mobilephoto to the pics that come through. Upload a photo, click on the tag and you have a photo stream of just those photos with that tag. Flickr gives you an rss feed for that tag gallery! Copy it and proceed to step two…
step two:
Set up Twitter feed with the rss feed you created in step one. Make sure you select the option to have the url added to the post so your Twitter friends can click on it and view your flickr stream. You can specify the posting frequency as well as the number of posts that twitterfeed posts up for you. 1 post per half hour should be fine for this purpose.
Step three:
Test the system. Best thing to do here is to to load up the most recent Cubeself photo and snap a goofy self-portrait and load it up!
We’re going to be using this feature when we go up to Alpine Meadows next weekend to meet up with Gizmodo and test out the new Nokia n95.
-Mike
