Automatic posting to Tumblr?

March 1, 2010 5:01 AM

I have a Tumblr blog and a collection of photos. I'd like a photo from the collection to automatically be posted on the Tumblr blog once per day. Is this (or something like it) possible?

I prefer the selection of the photo to be random, but it's also okay if they're in some kind of order. It's more important that no photo would ever be repeated (I would regularly add more photos to the collection).

The idea is to automate the process as much as possible, so if I forget or am on holiday or die in a plane crash, the blog is still updated. My only job would be to ensure that there are plenty of un-posted photos remaining in the collection.

I don't mind putting the photos in a Flickr account if that's required, but I'd like to be able to keep the photos private within the context of Flickr (so a person couldn't look at the Flickr account and see the whole collection of photos, thus ruining the daily surprise).

posted by transporter accident amy to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

There is a queue function where you can set the interval between publication. Just change the drop-down from "publish now" to "add to queue" and then click the "queue" link from your dashboard to set the interval. 24 h is maximum
posted by monocultured at 5:29 AM on March 1, 2010

Sorry, I might have misunderstood: You want your tumblr to pull images from Flickr?
posted by monocultured at 5:31 AM on March 1, 2010

Response by poster: It doesn't necessarily have to pull from Flickr; that just came to my mind because I use Flickr a lot, and it usually plays well with other sites. But I do want Tumblr to pull the pictures from somewhere. Ideally I'd like to set this up with the 30-ish photos I currently have; the blog will start updating automatically every day with no daily trigger from me; I'll keep adding more photos on top of the original 30; and the blog will continue to pull from that collection.
posted by transporter accident amy at 5:56 AM on March 1, 2010

Best answer: I'm relatively certain you have to upload all the photos to Tumblr and can't get it to "automatically" pull them from somewhere else. After you've uploaded to your heart's content (and within Tumblr's upload-per-day limitations), you'd use the queue function mentioned above.
posted by citywolf at 6:24 AM on March 1, 2010

Best answer: You can add the Tumblr bookmarklet, which plays nicely with Flickr, to at least cut down on the effort to post your images to your queue. Make sure to select 'Add to queue' instead of the default 'Publish now,' then set your queue to update once per day.
posted by kidsleepy at 8:03 AM on March 1, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks, guys! I suspected my ideal set-up was too good to be true. I'll use the bookmarklet and queue functions to approximate what I want.
posted by transporter accident amy at 11:47 PM on March 4, 2010