Using IFTTT with Facebook to add photos to Evernote

[jrcchicago 17]

Half or more of my Facebook posts are photos, and a lot of those are pictures of my kids and their various projects. I also have had a notebook for a while dedicated to pictures of my kids and their various projects, but haven't been particularly organized about adding pictures to it - it just wasn't a big part of my EN workflow or my photography workflow. What I needed was a way to import the pictures I already thought were worth sharing and add them automatically.

The web service If This, Then That can automatically create an Evernote note when you post a photo to FB, with a copy of the caption and a link to the photo on FB, but for some reason can't include the image itself in the note. For several months, I used that as a "good enough" option, but it wasn't really, and a couple of weeks ago I started paging through the available options at IFTTT.com to see what else I could come up with. After some trial and error, I realized I could set IFTTT to automatically email my Gmail account a copy of every photo I posted to FB, with the image, caption, and link, with a subject line that included the name of my EN archive notebook and the tags I wanted to attach to the note. Once I had that going, I set up a filter on Gmail to automatically forward every message from IFTTT to my Evernote email address. Works like a charm.

If you aren't using IFTTT with Evernote (and lots of other services), it's definitely worth checking out. Lifehacker ran an article about it a few months ago that gives just a few examples of what you can do with it, and another specifically about using it with Evernote.

[Martin Packer 162]

That's an excellent tip! I think it has wider applicability. But then there ought to be a native IFTTT recipe that gets this right. I've no idea how to create a recipe else I'd do it.