How I post my iPhone photos to Flickr and Twitter

Thanks to a tip by Ianiv awhile ago, I’ve discovered a great way to post iPhone photos online very quickly and without a lot of effort. Sure you can simply email your photos to Flickr or post them to Twitter via Twitpic, but why not do both at the same time and with more control over the process and not have to double post photos to different services?

This requires a couple of apps to get working. First of all, you’ll need Mobile Fotos which is a great Flickr management app that has a number of features we’ll take advantage of. The app lets you view and manage your Flickr account from your iPhone much more so than the mobile Flickr web version. Unlike emailing your photos to Flickr, Mobile Fotos can upload your photos at the full resolution they were taken at.

You’ll also need a Twitter client for your iPhone…I use Tweetie but Mobile Fotos supports most of them. You’ll also need to setup both applications with their host APIs which is a painless process and only takes a couple of clicks to setup. The apps will walk you through the authentication process.

So let’s go through the steps to post a photo to Twitter via Flickr using Mobile Fotos and Tweetie:

1. take a photo using the built in camera app or any other camera app you have…Mobile Fotos also can take pictures directly inside itself.
2. launch Mobile Fotos if it’s not already running.
3. Click Upload and browse your camera roll for a photo to upload. You’ll then get this screen:

Here is where you can set a title, description, tags and choose a set for it to go into on Flickr. The nice thing about this is that the tags and sets you choose will be there for the next upload. This can be a blessing and a curse. Great if you’re uploading a number of photos in a row from the same event but if you forget and then upload something next week and don’t change the new defaults, you’ll have to adjust things after the upload goes.

If you scroll down, you’ll get additional options including location, privacy and safety level:

Unfortunately, the location option uploads the location you are uploading from, not where the photo was actually taken and shows the level of accuracy on GPS (or in the screenshot above, cell tower location since it was taken with a 1st gen non-GPS iPhone).

4. click Upload in the top right and you’ll be taken back to your camera roll to continue selecting photos to upload. Hit cancel if you’re finished.

5. You’ll now be back at the main Mobile Fotos screen and should see a batch process message at the bottom of the screen. Depending on how you’re connected and how many photos you selected, this should go by fairly quickly. Once it’s complete, the message will disappear.

6. Now click on Your Photos and you should see the thumbnails from your Flickr account in a big scrollable list:

You may need to click on the refresh icon on the top right to show your recently uploaded photos. Mobile Fotos uses caching to speed browsing your photos so it may not display everything up to date unless you refresh.

7. click on the photo you’d like to post to Twitter. There should be an icon on the bottom left which will bring up this menu of options:

8. Choose Share Photo and then assuming you’ve setup Mobile Fotos to use your Twitter client, you should see this set of options:

9. Choose Twitter. This will then close Mobile Fotos and launch your Twitter client (in my case, Tweetie) and then create a new tweet like so:

The tweet will inherit the title you gave your photo in Flickr and provide a link to the photo. Press Send and you’re done.

It may seem like a lengthy process when it’s presented this way but it can happen rather quickly once you get the hang of the workflow and upload your photos in a couple of clicks. The only delay might be the speed of your connection to the internet.

The benefits of this method rather than using Twitpic is that you easily link any photo you have on Flickr, not just iPhone shots. You also get better stats and trackable comments via Flickr than Twitpic (in my opinion at least). The time saving batch upload function alone makes this process valuable to me and the better control over the tags and sets while you’re uploading rather than having to deal with it at a later time which most people would forget to do.