Are you already harnessing the power of the internet by using If This Then That? If not—it’s a powerful website that can quickly become a useful tool for a lot of your daily tasks. I’ve been using it for a year or so to keep my instagram albums in check. Sometimes you don’t want all of your IG’s posting to your wall or to an Instagram Album. Snore. That’s boring. I like having seasonal albums as well as albums for special events, trips & vacations and I love being able to assign a photo to a specific album directly in the Instagram app using If This Then That and hashtags! Here’s how:
1. Visit IFTTT.com and set up an account. Basically think of If This Then That as a website that helps you create online recipes. The recipes follow this format: If this happens, then make that happen. You plug in your different social platforms to be the ‘ingredients’. This will make sense in step 3.
2. After your initial account set up a page will load. Read through the info if you’d like, then scroll to the bottom and click “Create Recipe.”
3. Now its time to start the recipe. Remember the ‘ingredients’ mentioned in step one? For the IG to FB Album recipe you want Instagram as your first ingredient. So you will click on the blue “THIS” and then select the instagram logo (pictured above) to get started. It will ask you to Activate this by linking to your account. Do this and click “continue to next step”.
4. Now you need to select the trigger. The trigger is what you do on Instagram that you want followed by an action (posting to facebook). I select “New Photo by You Tagged”. This allows you to organize photos by hashtag.
5. Now you need to select your tag. Pick something short. For example I use #Summer to put photos in my Summer 2013 album. Or you could do #FB etc. Enter the word (but not the #) into the field and select “Create Trigger”.
6. Now you need to create the “THAT”, so click on the blue “THAT” and then select the Facebook logo. Once again click ‘Activate’ to link your accounts and then ‘Continue to the Next Step’.
7. On the next page you will choose the action. For this recipe we want “Upload a Photo from URL”. When the next section loads the only thing you need to enter is the “Album Name”. The catch here is that it needs to be spelled exactly the way you have it spelled on Facebook (i.e. Summer 2013). Enter the name of the album that you want these photos to go into and hit ‘Create Action’.
8. It should now show you a recap of your recipe. It should say something like “IF New Photo by (your Instagram handle) tagged #WhateverYourHashtagWas THEN upload a photo from URL to (Your Name)’s Photos. If this looks correct you can hit “create recipe”.
9. Now, when you post an instagram photo simply put your # in the caption and it will appear in your designated FB album. When you share you do not need to select the Share to Facebook button.
Simple as that! It’s easy to reuse this recipe so that you can have several hashtags working for you at once. For example, maybe you want an album for summer vacations, an album of your kids and an album of your dog—make three recipes with different hashtags for each album: #Summer #MyKidddos #Walter and start organizing your uploads!
(Note: Sometimes it takes 5-15 minutes for the photo to appear on Facebook, especially if you aren’t on Wifi when you upload. But be patient….it will always appear eventually.)
