Share Your Images (Automatically)

If you’ve ever shared photos on your smartphone before, you already know a few things you can do. Popular apps like Instagram and Flickr allow you to share pictures you’ve already taken, so you can stick with your existing favorites if you don’t want to do anything fancy. A few cool options lie beyond your standard choices, allowing you to automatically sync images, share with specific friends, and more. Android and iPhone users alike (among some others) can benefit from Dropbox’s automatic photo synchronization. Just get the mobile app for your phone (or tablet) and turn it on. Dropbox will automatically grab any photos in your camera roll and sync them to the cloud. (Note: iOS users will have to open the Dropbox app for this to happen.) If you have Dropbox installed on any computers, the photos will end up there as well. This way you don’t have to bother transferring anything to your computer or to the web. It’ll all happen by itself. Speaking of automation, iPhone users will want to grab the IFTTT app for lots of awesome sharing possibilities. By creating a few rules, you can automatically share any photos with a variety of services like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook. You also don’t have to upload every photo. You can tell IFTTT to only bother with images you add to a specific album to help avoid sending every picture you take to every social network you belong to. Currently Android doesn’t have an IFTTT app, unfortunately, but you can emulate some of its automated functionality. Instead of looking for a single app to do the job, focus on the services you want to share to. Google+ automatically syncs photos (which go to your Picasa account), Facebook’s official app does as well, and you can generally locate a third-party option for other services (e.g. Flickr). Whatever service you need to auto-upload to, just look for a specific app that can do it and you’ll probably find one. Once you’ve got your sharing automated—or at least made a bit easier—you’ve completed the cycle. You’ve used your smartphone to take some awesome images and used your smartphone to handle the rest.