tumblr bulk upload
June 16, 2011 4:37 AM

I want to upload about 1300 images to my tumblr queue. I want each image as an individual post. I want to release 4 images a day. I am on a mac. I have a web server if that helps. How can I do this?
posted by Infernarl to Computers & Internet (7 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
I think the easiest way would be to email the images using some kind of scripting language. It's not ideal, but it should be easy to do.

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/posting describes emailing your tumblr.

Use Python to go through your images and email them as attachments.

If you're feeling more adventurous, then use a Tumblr API to do your posting.
Here's a python library for tumblr.
posted by seanyboy at 4:43 AM on June 16, 2011


How to post an image to tumblr using python (stackoverflow).
posted by seanyboy at 4:44 AM on June 16, 2011


I start getting errors after posting 70 in a row, any ideas?
posted by Infernarl at 6:52 AM on June 16, 2011


never mind, seems to have been a tumblr side error

I am still doing things one by one. My current system is to upload the images to a server, view the directory listing, use a display linked images bookmarklet, use the Tumblr Post firefox extension to post to my queue. I have to right click on each individual image. So I am still doing something over a thousand times.
posted by Infernarl at 6:58 AM on June 16, 2011


If you have any scripting/programming chops, tumblr has a public api, and there are open source libraries for it for various languages. I've used it and it works, but I can guarantee that there will be limits on how many requests you can send per chunk of time. If it were me, I'd write a script that takes some number and posts those in succession, then throw it in a cron job that runs this script every few minutes or so.

Note that the tumblr queue is VERY flaky. 1300 queued images... oiy. I've had problems with 40. I've seen posts get out of order, or the queue just won't schedule them properly, or just refuses to load in the dashboad. Personally, I'd try queuing up a month at a time, instead of a full year.
posted by cgg at 9:21 AM on June 16, 2011


Seconding cgg. There have been multiple times when Tumblr emptied out my queue on one day or didn't post all. It's part of the reason I switched to Posterous.
posted by reenum at 12:09 PM on June 16, 2011


Thirding cgg. The Tumblr queue is completely untrustworthy: I haven't used it since the time I woke up to find it had published all 75 items in my queue overnight. I now queue my posts in 'drafts' and post items manually.
posted by hot soup girl at 12:39 PM on June 16, 2011


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