Automatically post photos from DSLR to Tumblr

I’ve always been frustrated by the painful workflow required to keep loved ones up-to-date with our photos. We have a DSLR and take a ton of pictures, but generally take 6 months to 1 year to cull through and upload them. That is a fail. I wanted to easily be able to select the photos we liked right after shooting and have the upload process magically happen from there without any computers or cables.

So, I began researching and discovered a product that help me get 90% of the way there – EyeFi Memory cards! They are awesome and somewhat magical – how can a memory card also have WiFi enabled?

Not only do they have WiFi, but you can have it easily upload to several services (Picassa, Facebook, etc). Unfortunately, I wanted to have the photos be uploaded to Tumblr; an integration they didn’t provide out of the box.

To solve that, I ended up using their upload to ftp service and created a small php script that ran at a set interval through a cron job.

The php script basically looks at the photos uploaded and emails the newly uploaded photos. Code is can be found here: https://github.com/thebillplease/tinker/blob/master/listdb.php

Setup:
– EyeFi 8GB card configured for ftp upload
– Camera
– Ftp server
– Cron Job
– Tumblr email address

Note: There is a weird cap on Tumblr’s side that only accepts the first 4 photos from an email. I have already reached out to them. They have acknowledged the issue, but have not provided a deadline for the fix.