WTOTW: Automatically post selected Instagram photos to your blog with ifttt

My Instagram yesterday got a lot of likes and apparently people are really interested to do this, so here’s a quick tutorial how.

This tutorial will show you how to post *selected* Instagram photos to your WordPress blog, automatically. All you need to do is to tag your Instagram with a hashtag for it to work.

ifttt

The key to doing this is a service called ifttt, which is short for “if this then that”. Basically you tell it to watch for a trigger (if this) and do something in response (then that). See the quick one-page guide on their site. Tip: ifttt is pronounced like ‘lift’ without the ‘l’.

Update: ifttt promptly updated their site design so the screenshots you see below are slightly different.

Step 1: Sign up for ifttt

Sign up for ifttt through this page: http://ifttt.com/join. If I remember correctly, ifttt will automatically activate a few channels for you. Channels are the services and apps that ifttt can interact with.

Step 2: Get WordPress ready for ifttt

Before ifttt can interact with your blog you need to activate a setting on your blog. Login to your WordPress dashboard and go to Settings → Writing.

Scroll to the bottom and select the XML-RPC checkbox and click Save Changes.

Step 3: Use my recipe

ifttt has a feature calls recipes, which are tasks created by users which others can reuse. I saved my ifttt task as a recipe. Go to the recipe page and click the Use recipe button.

Use this recipe: http://ifttt.com/recipes/40976

If this is your first time using ifttt, it will tell you that you are missing ingredients. Click the Activate buttons to allow ifttt to access your Instagram and your blog.

Next, customize the recipe options.

First, you can change the tag that ifttt will watch out for. In my recipe I use the tag ‘instablog’ but you can change it to anything you want, e.g. ‘instagram2wp’.

You can also set the title, body, categories and tags for the post. Leave categories and tags blank if you don’t use them on your blog. Click the big blue Create task button.

Hooray, we’re done! Now post an Instagram photo and tag it with the trigger tag.

Wait 15 minutes (ifttt only checks your Instagram once every 15 minutes) and your photo will now be posted to your blog. Success!

Did I leave something out? If you’re stuck, leave a comment and I’ll try to help. If you found this useful, please click the share (Twitter, Facebook) buttons to tell your friends.


1 Comment on "WTOTW: Automatically post selected Instagram photos to your blog with ifttt"

  • Awesome! I love tools that has imagination as the limit.

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