How to post pictures to your blog with your iPhone
I’ve been doing this for a while, so I thought I’d write a little tutorial on how you can take pictures from your iPhone and post them directly to your blog, without first downloading them to your computer.You will need:
- An iPhone
- An email address that no ones knows about
- A blog platform that allows you to post via email
Get an iPhone
Alternatively, this should work with any device that has a camera and can email pictures.
Get an email address that no one knows about
You can get a free one from Gmail, or use your friendly local provider. Never tell anyone this email address, because you want the only emails sent to it to come from you. If a spammer can guess the name, they would be able to post to your blog! Note that the email address has to support either POP3 or IMAP. Some free providers only give you Webmail for free, so addresses from Yahoo or Hotmail won’t work unless you pay them. Gmail is free, though.
Setup your blog to post via email
I believe that there are different blog packages that will allow you to post via email, but I’m going to show how to do this with WordPress. Now, if you look under Options -> Writing in WordPress, there is a Post by Email option. Unfortunately, this only works for text and won’t allow you to post pictures.Thankfully, there is a plugin for WordPress which will allow posting pictures via email. It’s called Postie. To install the Plugin, click the preceding link. Then download the Postie.zip file. You then need to unzip the file. Mac users can double click it, and WinXP/Vista users can doubleclick and then extract the files. You’ll be left with a folder called Postie. You need to FTP this folder up to your WordPress Plugins directory, which is in your WordPress directory, then wp-content, then plugins.If you aren’t sure what FTP is or how to use it, google for Cyberduck if you’re a Mac user, or FileZilla if you’re a Windows user. You’ll use these programs to upload the postie folder to WordPress.Once you have uploaded the folder, you have to create two folders to hold your photos. With your FTP program, go back to your WordPress directory and create two folders. Name one wp-photos, and the other wp-filez. This matches the defaults that postie uses.Now visit your WordPress backend with your Web browser(found at http://yourblog.com/wp-admin). Click on Plugins and activate Postie. Then click on Options, then you’ll see a new option called “Configure Postie.”Â
Configuring Postie
Not much has to be changed here, luckily (geez there are a lot of options). Make sure that authorized addresses has your email address. Now, when you send a photo using your iPhone, it uses whatever is set to be your default account. To verify this, press on Settings, then Mail, then scroll to the bottom and make sure Default Account is set how you want.Now back in Postie, type your default email address into Authorized Addresses.I didn’t change any other settings besides Mailserver Settings, but there are some things to check out, such as changing the default category that your photo posts will be set to, and setting a default subject.Once you’ve checked that out, go down to Mailserver Settings. Now you need to know what capabilities your email provider has given you. If you use Gmail, they offer POP3 and IMAP for free, but you have to login to your hidden email account, click on Settings, and enable POP3 or IMAP. So what’s the difference between POP3 and IMAP? For these purposes, if you use POP3, the emails that you send will be downloaded by Postie and deleted. If you use IMAP, they will be downloaded but NOT deleted. If you are using Gmail, may as well use IMAP, since they give you so much space, but many email providers give fairly small mailboxes, so using POP3 would be better. Gmail doesn’t use regular POP or IMAP, though. They use SSL to encrypt all of your emails that you send to them. So if you use Gmail, set the Mail Protocol in Postie to be IMAP-SSL. Under Mail Server, set it to imap.gmail.com. The port number is 993. The Mail Userid should be your gmail address, and put the password into Mail Password. Â
Setting Up a Cron Job
 The final step is to create a cron job that will activate Postie. With my hosting provider, I had to go to the Crontab section and make a cron job that runs every 5 minutes with the command: /usr/local/bin/lynx –source http://www.mebweb.net/blog/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/nullReplace the url with your own domain, and you should be all set!