Automatic photo slideshow from Facebook feed

August 17, 2012 6:15 PM

Wedding slideshow brainstorm: Is there a way to have an automatically updated slideshow running from a Facebook photo feed?

So surely I'm not the first person to have this idea. At the rehearsal dinner tonight for a friends wedding, some of the attendees were excited that so-and-so posted a picture from that very rehearsal to Facebook. The venue already has a projector set up, I have a Windows laptop I could bring in tomorrow easily for the wedding.

While I'm quite technical, I have little Facebook experience. This is what I'd like to be able to do:

1. Person takes a photo at the wedding on their phone.

2. Uploads to Facebook.

3. Tags the photo with something specific - a certain album on the bride's Facebook account? As far as I know, this might be the most difficult part of the whole operation.

3B. A secondary option for non-Facebook people? Email, Twitter, etc. Not as concerned about this.

4. A full screen slideshow program on the laptop will pull photos from that Facebook feed. Ideally it will update automatically so I can run it without interruption on screen.

So I see a couple of options - a slideshow program that can pull from the RSS feed directly. Or a way to automatically pull photos from that Facebook feed onto the computer locally, and a slideshow program that will watch that location.

Oh, last thing - the wedding is tomorrow.

posted by shinynewnick to computers & internet (4 answers total)

On further investigation, it looks like Number 3 is the toughest part, as I feared. I set up a group page for Friend's Wedding; unfortunately it looks like people can only post a photo there after they've been manually added to the group. Perhaps there's a reason people haven't tried this before!
posted by shinynewnick at 6:49 PM on August 17, 2012

It might be easier to work out a way to have people text the photo to an email address (I think most phone services can do this?). If you set up IFTTT and set up an "email" trigger it will let you send emails to IFTTT with a file attachment (hopefully, phones will attach the photo to the email); you can set a Facebook action to upload that file to facebook, or do something else with it.

But the send-emails-to-IFTTT bit requires that the emails come from your email address. So you can register a new email address ("[e-mail]") with a filter set up to forward everything to [e-mail]. Register on IFTTT with shiny-new-wedding as your main email address, and you will be able to set up a trigger that captures any email to [e-mail].

Getting the photos to display hands free on a screen... hmm.

Now that you have IFTTT collecting links to the photos, you can use it to put the photos into Dropbox. Now you just need a slideshow program which can run on a directory and, crucially, monitors it for additions; I don't have any particular suggestions on that part.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:04 PM on August 17, 2012

Here's an IFTTT recipe that (I think) does what I had in mind.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:06 PM on August 17, 2012

Or just email to dropbox directly! (Haven't used this myself)
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 9:12 PM on August 17, 2012 [1 favorite]