High Order Blog

One of my favorite uses of Twitter is as a means for sharing photos. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve included the best photo previews of any Twitter app on the App Store. I also love to post my own photos on Twitter, but I prefer Flickr to host all pictures I keep online. I’m finicky about the software I use, and I dislike all of the dedicated Twitter photo sharing sites like TwitPic and Yfrog. That’s not a knock on them or the people that use and love those service. They just don’t appeal to me personally.

Since the vast majority of Twitter users use those sites, we worked to support those first and well in Twitbit. But soon I was itching to post my pictures directly to Flickr from Twitbit, and one of the great things about building software that you use yourself is that you get to add the features you want. We added Flickr integration into Twitbit 2.0, and it’s one of the features that’s only available in the pro version.

Flickr photo sharing in Twitbit includes an extra feature that some people may not be aware of: automatic tagging of Flickr photos uploaded with Twitbit. Once you’re able to tag photos automatically, the door opens to some fun integration with other web services.

I use Tumblr to host my personal blog. If you haven’t tried Tumblr, I highly recomnend it. It’s free, dead simple, there’s tons of great themes, and you don’t have to get into any of the hassle of hosting your weblog yourself.

One of Tumblr’s great features is its built-in integration with other services. You can configure Tumblr to include content you send to other sites into your Tumblr blog automatically.

Using these two features — automatic tagging of Flickr photos with Twitbit and automatic import of content with Tumblr — you can automatically post all photos you upload from Twitbit to your Tumblr blog.

Let’s set it up.

Say you want to tag all photos uploaded with Twitbit with “toshare”. In Twitbit, tap your account name in the top of the Timeline tab, tap the “Photo & Video” section. Add Flickr as a photo service if you haven’t already by tapping “Add a New Service…” (Remember, Flickr is only available in Twitbit Pro.)

Once Flickr is installed as a service, tap “Flickr” under the list of available services, and in the Settings section tap “Tag Photos & Video”. Twitbit will download the list of tags currently associated with your Flickr account. Tags selected here will automatically be applied to any photos or videos you upload with Twitbit. You can select as many as you would like, or scroll to the bottom of the list and tap “Add a New Tag” to add a tag you haven’t used before.

Now log into Flickr and navigate to a photo page that includes the “toshare” tag. Click the “toshare” tag link on the right (or whatever tag you’ve chosen), which will take you to a page of all your photos that include that tag. In your browser’s address bar, on the far right, will be an RSS icon. In Safari, click that RSS icon, and choose the RSS feed (the Atom feed probably works, too, but I haven’t tried it so I don’t know for sure). Your browser may be slightly different but the workflow should be roughly the same. Copy the URL of the RSS feed to your clipboard.

Finally, navigate to your Tumblr dashboard and click the “Customize” link for your blog. Click the Services button at the top. Where it says “Automatically import my…”, select “RSS Feed” and “Photos” as the content type. Finally, paste the URL in the text field where it says “Field URL”.

That’s it! You’ll see this automatic import listed at the bottom of the Services list. Tumblr will start to check this RSS feed periodically. Anything you post from Twitbit will be automatically tagged on your Flickr site and posted to your Tumblr blog!

Enjoy!