Continuing on the Instagram subject
from yesterday. One thing I was thinking about all last night was
how I wished I could take instagram like photos and have them reside
on my website, where I would have complete control over their use.
It brought me back to my android app wish list, one of which being a
photo upload app to my Photoshelter account. But I know Andrew and
the guys have bigger things to work on right now (you guys still rock btw!).
Then late last night, it hit me....wait
a sec...I can already do this! All I need are a few free apps
and a work flow. So, here it is! all you really need to have
yourself a do-it-yourself instagram.
Account for a photo repository
website. Personally I've used Photoselter from day one when I
got back into photography professionally. I'll bet this may work for
Smugmug and Zenfolio as well. Be forewarned you many have to buy
into one of the upper level packages offered for this to work,
depending on who you go with.
An FTPclient app. I
originally picked up AndFTP, in the google PLAY store, as a last
resort if I ever needed to transmit photos from the field since my
laptop died. I realized this could work when I noticed it pop up as
one of the share options when I hit the “share” button on a few
apps last night.
Camera
app with effects/filter package. As of right now I'm
working with Pixlr-o-matic as my instagram replacement camera . At
first I was a little apprehensive of this one, it's kind of childish
with half the filters being named after Harry Potter Characters. But
the interface is bang on, and the cropped photos it produces match up
almost perfectly with ones taken by Instagram.
Now that you have everything...here's
what you need to do.
Step 1; create an FTP upload
account in your photo site.
In photoshelter this is pretty
straightforward. If your just a standard member, you are only
allowed one active FTP upload account. I would also suggest to make
the username and password are different than your login passwords.
Make sure you set up a gallery and point the account to upload to
that gallery or who knows where it will get uploaded to.
Step 2; setup AndFTP to upload
to your photo site.
If you have used an FTP client before
this is a no brainer. If you haven't, just populate the info from
your FTP upload account into the related fields. Hit the connect
button to see you everything works. You may want to do a test upload
right from the FTP Client, to see if the photo goes to the right gallery.
Step 3; take picture and edit.
Step 4; hit share button and share via
the FTP app.
If you did everything right the FTP
app will automatically upload the photo to your photo site.
Step 5 (optional); go back to
you photo website and caption and keyword your images.
So far I have not found a camera app
that will edit IPTC metadata fields, specifically the caption and
keyword fields. I think they do this to keep the file sizes down on
mobile networks. But if you want your images found by Google, or
Chinese take out foodies, you kind of have to so this.
Also keeping with the “control over
your images” theme...If your photo site has a sales option you can
set up print sales or even license the photo to ad and print
companies(Um...isn't that want Instagram wanted to do?)
So there you have it, let me know if
this works for you, or if you've found a better way.
Cheers!
-D
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