Finding time to post images to social media can be a real pain in the backside, especially when photography is a part time hobby which takes third place behind work, and then family. I wanted to share a handy trick which might provide some useful information for those who a. blog, and b. use the WordPress platform… It can be automated (sort-of).

My images take two different forms, the first is a post, where I include a number of images (and one featured image) which get sent out to the various social networks (e.g. Google, Twitter, 500px, Flickr, Instagram and so on). In addition to a featured image, a link is also shared which directs back to the post the image came from. The reason for the link back is that there may be more content that I cannot share in a single social media post, or descriptions and tips on how to capture those images.

The second form my images take, is a single image to be posted out to the various social media networks, but not linked to a specific article; This is known as a custom post type. The custom post type consists of a title, a featured image, an excerpt, and image tags (e.g. hashtags).

In both cases, I can schedule these images to be posted into the future, and once they become ‘published' one of two different plugins kick on.

The Plugins:

Social Network Autoposter Pro by NextScripts
Instagram Auto Posted by Code Canyon

I do on occasion have issues with the Social Network Auto poster, but for the most part it works fairly well. I use these for publishing images but they can equally be used for publishing links to articles and other content.

* Update: I struggled with the support for NextScripts given the ongoing cost, as such I moved to an alternative called fsposter which does 90% of what nextscripts does (including posting to instagram), another option may be to look at something like zapier however, this does not support posting images to instagram personal accounts.