Are you a photographer using multiple sites for presenting your work? Do you find updating all your profiles tedious? I certainly do, so in my digging through the ‘net, I found an excellent tool for that. (Broken in 2023)
Update, May 2023: IFTTT changed how their system works, actions used here are no longer available to free users, breaking the embedded links.
Enter IFTTT – short for If This Than That. IFTTT is a nifty tool that helps you pipe output from one source to another, and that’s exactly what I need. I primarily use Flickr for showing my photos, but I also use 500px, Tumblr and Twitter, and I would like to keep them all updated. This is where IFTTT jumps in – it isn’t able to update every service possible, but it helps a lot by keeping at least some of them in sync.
IFTTT uses the concept of “recipes” – scripts that do some work. Each script has two “channels” – the trigger channel with its “trigger” (source), and the action channel with its “action” (destination). The source gets triggered whenever its condition is met, and fires the destination action – basically, you’re plugging the source channel into the destination channel. In my case, I wanted to keep my 500px account synced with Flickr. So I created a recipe with the Flickr channel as a source, with an “Any new public photo” trigger that gets fired every time I upload a public photo to my photostream. I used the 500px channel as the destination, which has only one available action – “Upload photo from URL” – to pipe my fresh Flickr uploads to 500px.
For quickly jumping into the stream, you can use the following recipes instantly: Flickr uploads to 500px, or the other way around, 500px uploads to Flickr.
For more sources and destinations, you can easily add your own recipes, or you can use one of the following: Flickr uploads to Facebook, and 500px uploads to Facebook.
That’s all for now, more recipes coming soon.
