Using IFTTT To Automate All Your Facebook Photos & Video [Facebook Tip Or Hack Of The Week]

By Angela Alcorn, MakeUseOf – July 31, 2012 at 06:31PM

Not everyone uses Facebook to store their photos and video, but alternative photo and video storage still doesn’t seem to have the best social integration just yet. Most of the alternatives are designed for more public sharing and aren’t always great at alerting your friends when there’s something new to look at. There’s also no denying that there are plenty of bored friends our there who love to see photo and video updates from you via Facebook. Why not automatically send a few of your favourites along for them to see?

If This Then That (IFTTT) is one of the simplest web automators around and can help you get things copied from A to B and vice versa. So, here’s a few cool IFTTT recipes to get your photos and video from wherever you prefer to keep them (e.g. Flickr, Dropbox, Instagram, or YouTube) into Facebook, plus a few neat ways to get the best photos your friends upload of you from Facebook out to somewhere useful.

Auto-Upload All Flickr Photos To Facebook

If all your photos go to Flickr, but you want to keep your Facebook friends in the loop too, then try this IFTT recipe. Any public photo you put on Flickr will be sent to Facebook.

Auto-Upload One Tag Of Flickr Photos To Facebook

Here’s a twist on the previous Flickr-to-Facebook automation which allows you to specify a specific Flickr tag to trigger an upload to Facebook. This is perfect if you upload all your photos to Flickr, but only want to bother your friends on Facebook with a few of the better ones.

Instagram Photos To Facebook Album

If you are taking lots of pictures using Instagram you’ve probably got some great photos shared out there with the wider world. But, how many of your friends have seen them? Using this recipe, your Instagram photos are automatically uploaded to Facebook into a special album.

Tagged Facebook Photos Sent To Flickr

Your friends might be great at taking happy snaps at parties and uploading their photos of you to Facebook. But once it’s been tagged and seen by a few people the buzz usually dies down. You might not ever see that photo again unless you trawl through all of the photos you’re tagged in. So why not keep your own copy?

This recipe automatically copies those tagged Facebook photos over to Flickr, where you can dedicate a set to “Photos you’re tagged in”.

Send Facebook Photos Tagged As You To Dropbox

This is much the same as the previous recipe. If you always have friends tagging you in Facebook photos and you want to keep them for your own memories, try the IFFT recipe which will send the tagged Facebook photos to Dropbox for you. It’s all automatic and you’ll find them in Dropbox when you want to browse them later.

Facebook Photos Tagged As You Are Copied To Private Facebook Album

Again, this is the same idea as the previous two recipes, but it’s for people who like to keep Facebook photos within Facebook. You’ll have your own private Facebook album of all the photos you’re tagged in.

New Flickr Sets Posted As Facebook Link

Your Flickr sets might be organised and informative, but your Facebook friends never seem to notice. Here’s a way to automatically post a Facebook link to your new Flickr sets.

Favourite YouTube Videos Posted As Facebook Link

If you’re always finding neat videos on YouTube and want to share them with your friends, there’s an IFTTT recipe to help you do this. This will post a Facebook link to any new YouTube video you’ve favourited.

Uploaded YouTube Videos Posted As Facebook Link

Here’s a recipe which is much the same as above, but will be executed whenever you upload a video to YouTube. A link to your video upload will be posted to Facebook automatically.

Send Videos You Upload To Vimeo Posted As Facebook Link

If your friends miss your video uploads to Vimeo, this IFTTT recipe will help to get their attention. It posts a Facebook link to any Vimeo videos you upload.

Don’t forget that all of these recipes can be adapted and tweaked to your liking – or even re-created to be exactly right. Mix and match the services or the actions as you please!