You know sometimes there are those tools that you find out about and once you start using them you wonder how you managed without them? Well, one of those, for me, is IFTTT. IFTTT stands for “IF This, Then That” and if you’re a programmer, it can be likened to an If statement for real life.
What it does is incredibly simple. You give it a trigger to wait for, and tell it that when this trigger happens, do something. Triggers and actions can include all sorts of things, from taking photos to tweets matching certain criteria, to location data, the time of the day, or news and weather events. There are “channels” for websites, media, devices and sources, and it’s these Channels that you use for your triggers and actions, and a trigger and action pair is called a Recipe.
For example: I have a screenshot Tumblr blog, where I put all the screenshots I take on whatever gaming devices I happen to be able to take screenshots on. I use various methods to get the images on to Tumblr as not all devices support it directly or easily.
For my Mac (so for screenshots taken either directly or within Steam), I copy the files to a folder in my Dropbox folder, and I have a recipe that checks for files in that folder and uploads any to Tumblr.
I could do this on my PS4, as unfortunately you can’t easily post to Tumblr from it, but I’d have to transfer the files via USB stick to my Mac first. The PS4 does support posting to Twitter though, so I can leverage that instead:
Now, if I tweet a picture with the #t hashtag (I could use anything in reality, but I went for short to save space), it’s uploaded to Tumblr.
I use these screenshots on my Gaming Diary a lot, so it’s useful to also have a copy of them locally ready for me to upload. For those I put into a folder to send to Tumblr, I already have them, but what about the others?
With this, all the images posted to Tumblr get saved to my Dropbox. Of course, this does mean that in some cases I have two copies of each (one in the upload folder, one in the download folder) but I delete the uploaded ones every so often anyway so it’s not an issue.
Aside from screenshot fun, I use IFTTT for a lot of other things too. For example, I have a number of Recipes that save things I’ve bookmarked, liked or favourited to Pocket, to look at later.
For example, if I mark a video as “Watch Later” on YouTube, it gets sent to Pocket:
Or this:
Which saves any links in tweets that I favourite to Pocket.
One of our service providers at work have a newsdesk that provides updates via RSS. As they’re often important and urgent, I created an IFTTT Recipe to send my phone an alert every time they post something via the RSS feed. You can of course use any RSS feed:
And finally, I was forever forgetting to take the empty shopping bags out of the car when I go to the supermarket, meaning I’d none at the checkout and I’d have to buy more, so I have a location trigger to alert my phone when I go near the shop:
Of course, there are loads of other things I use it for that are really only useful to me and not worth sharing as a result. What do you use it for?