Red Is A Flavor

January
8

Post Images to Twitter via Email (Flickr/Twitter Hack)

Two of the most useful and powerful web 2.0 applications (in my opinion) can easily linked together using the RSS-to-Twitter tool Twitterfeed. Using this and Flickr's upload-via-email feature, you can build a powerful enhancement to your Tweeting arsenal, which allows you to tweet images easily from email.

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Posting images to Twitter via Flickr is not new. Dave Winer developed TwitterGram, which in addition to adding audio to tweets, allow image post via Flickr (http://flickr.twittergram.com/). But the way I illustrate below is extremely easy, straight-forward and puts you in 100% control of your tweets.

To Set it Up

The following assumes you have both a Flickr and Twitter account setup already.

Go to TwitterFeed.com [http://www.twitterfeed.com] and logon. You can logon using any OpenID provided, including Flickr.
And create a new RSS-to-Twitter push
Add the RSS URL to your Flickr Feed, which can be found on the bottom of your Flickr Page. Just look for the RSS icon. See mine at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jking89/
Set the INCLUDE OPTION to "Title Only"
Set the FILTER BY KEYWORDS value to "twitter" (and/or any other tags you want to tweet)
That's it!

How to Use

To post a image tweet-via-flickr, simply generate an email and attach the image. With the following fields.

To:
[your unique Flickr upload address]

Subject:
Title of your Image (This will be in your tweet)

Body:
tags: twitter (plus any other applicable tags)

The Results

A image uploaded to Flickr...

and a nicely formatted tweet with a shortened URL to your Flickr Image.

Using Twitterfeed allows to to customize and tweek your tweets, as well as setup different feeds for different purposes. For example images with the tag "vacation" post to Twitter prefixed by "What I'm currently doing on vacation...".

Another benefit of this method, is that Twitterfeed will automatically shorten the link, saving those precious 140 characters.