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[How-To] Back-up Instagram Images to the Cloud with IFTTT for iOS

Instagram IFTTT backupI’m all about automating my digital life. IFTTT (If This, Then, That) is a easy-to-use but powerful tool that lets me do just that. If you’re not familiar, with IFTTT you can activate “channels” of frequent digital services you use to create “recipes” that are made up of triggers and actions that carry out certain tasks.

Honestly, the possibilites of IFTTT are endless. To make matters worse, IFTTT for iOS was recently released that lets you quickly create recipes and view current activity from your mobile device. So to wet your appetite, I thought I’d put together a little tutorial on creating a recipe to automate a task I suggest everyone do: Back-up Instagram images.

Background
I’d like to think that I’m a pretty frequent Instagram user. Earlier this year, I’ve looked into having more control over my photos for two reasons:

1. As a result of the hub-bub that went down with Instagram’s ToS changes ealier this year in regards who can do what with my photos

2. Since I frequently use Instagram images elsewhere, but don’t like the Instagram search function for browsing my images (hint: There isn’t a search function for browsing my images).

I figured the best way would be to back-up all my Instagram photos, just in case I need to find a particular image, or if Facebook Instagram starts tripping about their photos again. Yeah, I know…Within Instagram there is an option to “Save Original Photos” to my camera roll. Honestly, I don’t want to jam up my phone with any more pics than I already have…and the search option on my phone sucks (hint: There isn’t a serch function for browsing my images).

All that to say, since I already have a ton of cloud storage space I’m not using, might as well re-puropose it as “online media backup space”. That’s where IFTTT comes in. I’ve created a recipe that essentially searches my public Instagram profile for new pictures and downloads them to my cloud storage account. Since the IFTTT for iOS makes it even to create recipes than on the web, I created this recipe as well as the entire tutorial on how to back-up Instagram photos to the web on my iPhone.

(Shout-out to Skitch for making it easy to mark-up screenshots, and Guidecentral for creating and embedding the tutorial)


How to back up Instagram images to the cloud with IFTTT by brothatech

Relax, if you don’t have an iPhone, you can create this same recipe by visiting IFTTT on the web. With IFTTT, you can do a kinds of cool little tricks. I use it to back up Facebook photos, to share all my new blog posts to Twitter and my Facebook page, to share my “tribe” posts, send package tracking updates to my Pebble watch…and some other stuff I can’t think of right now.

Be sure to try out IFTTT and let me know what kinds of recipes you can cook up.

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