Share Pictures From Your Phone Without Tasteless Advertising [How To]

Over the past few months I’ve enjoyed sharing personal photos on the go, right through my iPhone. Since many people ask how I do so much in so little time, allow me to share some behind-the-scenes with you.

When I started sharing photos earlier this year, I realized there many free websites I could send photos to. I was also overwhelmed by how many of them offered tasteless advertising that distracted from the photos I wanted to share. Case in point with this recent photo that someone shared with me through twitter.

At least it wasn’t an advertisement for women’s underwear.

What I’m about to share with you is completely free, though I choose to pay $10 per year and I’ll explain why.

I Don’t Have Time to Post Everywhere

I don’t have time to post pictures directly to every service I subscribe to. If this didn’t work with one click, I wouldn’t do it.

I take a picture, give it a description, and immediately it’s posted on my personal website, along with Facebook and twitter.

 

Ready to get started? It’s quick and easy; I promise.

Sign Up for These Free Tools

• Facebook- to tell friends about your picture
• Twitter - to tell followers about your picture
• Tumblr - landing page for individual pictures, minus annoying ads
• Instagram - optional for iPhone and coming soon to Android (to take and filter pictures if you like)

I mentioned that I pay $10 / year for this setup, but you don’t need to if you’d rather buy two cups of coffee from Starbucks.

First, grab a tumblr account and call it whatever you like. My initial page was jlukasavige.tumblr.com, which now forwards to the more professional justinlukasavige.com.

Custom Tumblr Domain

Follow these directions if you’d like to use your own custom tumblr domain, which I recommend. You can get the domain anywhere you like but I recommend GoDaddy or 1and1 (affiliate links with discounts for you). Unless it’s an oddball extension like .tv or .co it should be less than $10 per year.

Connect Tumblr to Twitter

You need to link these two services so tumblr automatically sends everything you post to twitter. I don’t connect Facebook to twitter at this point and I’ll show you why tomorrow, along with the right way to do it.

Click your name at the top of your Tumblr dashboard. Click settings and scroll a bit to find a section that will allow you to send your posts to twitter.

How to Post Your Pictures

I use Instagram to take pictures and apply cool filters instantly, right on my iPhone. Instagram recently announced they’re working on a version for Android, so stay tuned. If you have an Android, you can still take pictures and upload them directly to tumblr.

After you apply your filter (or choose not to use one), you’ll press the green checkmark. You’ll be presented with a few sharing options on the next page, but it’s important you don’t use any of them.

Sharing through the above options will work, but it will take viewers to an instagram page with just one photo on it. I’d rather my visitors land on a site I control and be able to get caught up in more media if they like. Also, if you turn these sharing options on, you’ll have something along the lines of, “shared via @instagram” included in your post or tweet.

When you press the Done button in the upper-right corner, you’ll see your completed photo. Scroll down slightly to find this odd-looking button.

Press that button to find an option to “Share post.”

Setup Tumblr sharing on the following screen. You will only do this once from this point forward.

The next screen allows you to enter text, which shows up below the picture on tumblr and in your post or tweet on Facebook and twitter.

Pictures Automatically Posted from Tumblr to Twitter

Once you enter text and share, your post is automatically sent to twitter. I send mine to Facebook too, but I’ll share a better way to make this automatic tomorrow.

Clicking that link brings you to this page.

Easy, right?

I don’t follow this same procedure with Facebook because it doesn’t post the way I like. Instead of posting the photo into an album on facebook (so it can be viewed forever), it’s only inserted into your stream as a graphic and link to your tumblr page.

The solution? Easy, and, you guess it, FREE! Check back tomorrow for that tutorial.

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