When John Saddington announced Pressgram a few years back, I was using an Android phone and was completely envious. It sounded like a great idea, to own your own content and publish it to your WordPress site. Especially with the changes in Instagram and the worries about privacy, it seemed like a good idea at the right time. In the end, things didn’t work out and Pressgram went away, but I suspect many people still want an easy way to publish images to their WordPress blog. So I made a workflow in workflow app to replace Pressgram which I’m going to share and let you customize.
What is Workflow?
In case you haven’t heard of Workflow, it is an iOS only app (sorry Mac, Windows, and Android users) which makes simple graphical automated sequences. It’s been around for a couple of years now and over time has added more apps and more powerful features. Some of the original ideas around Workflow include:
- Workflows to turn a series of photos into a gif
- Workflows to send a text to your partner with an estimated time till you get home
- Workflows to get a street view of your next calendar event
- Workflows to make a tip calculator
And so on. Basically, you can replace a string of apps or make your own custom apps to simplify tasks.
My Pressgram Workflow
With Pressgram, you’d post your image to WordPress, and then choose which social networks you wanted to post to. I wanted to replace this functionality, so at first I created a super simple WordPress publishing workflow. This allows you to set a title for your image (good for SEO), a caption for your post and upload it as a new post.
However, people want to share their images on different networks, the issue was which networks do different people want to share to. Some like Facebook, others Twitter, and other Instagram. Sometimes you want to share things everywhere, other times just to one or another network. To aid this, I used “Choose from menu” to allow people to select if they want to share to that network or not. So you have to click “yes” several times to post everywhere. If you know that you always want to share everywhere, you could set it up so that you don’t have to click.
As I was preparing for this post I remembered that Pressgram used to link back to the original WordPress post as well. I thought this would be a good touch to add in as well so my idea was to post to WordPress first, get the URL of the post and then add that to the comment for the post. This was a little tricky for me as the WordPress action doesn’t naturally give you the URL. Instead, I set up a test WordPress site and used it to pull the last RSS entry.
One of the issues with using this, is that it relies on Twitter cards based on the feature image in a post. You may not use feature images in your implementation so you might need a different work around AND not everyone will see the image if they don’t use a default Twitter client.
Adapt It for Yourself
The best thing about Workflow, is you can make some simple adjustments so that it works better for you and what you want. I’d love to know what changes you make.
Dave says
First – Thanks for this. I remember being so very hyped for Pressgram, only to see it die way too soon.
Second – Is there some benefit to using Workflow over IFTTT?
Chris Wilson says
Hey Dave. First of all I know what you mean about pressgram. Second workflow is now free as well as Apple bought the app (but that probably means it won’t be updated in the future).
Workflow is based on your phone more than IFTTT which is more server based. As such you can do certain actions with workflow that you can’t with IFTTT (for example merging photos to create a gif or adding text from a note) yet you can’t remotely trigger an action from say the weather conditions. You can use workflow with launch centre pro to trigger actions based on location though.
In addition workflow allows you to make conditional statements and more complex actions than IFTTT. While they are similar, they are really different too.
I hope that helps.