I’m not a photographer. I’m not artistic in that particular way and I don’t want to learn to have to be. The joy of Instagram is I can take a photo, slap a filter on it, put a border, and boom. Done. Share it with friends. The sad part about Instagram is putting that photo on my blog. It’s all machinations and annoyances.
What I wanted:
- An easy way to take ‘styled’ pictures.
- An easy way to push those pictures to my blog.
- An easy way to determine how I want the pictures to post.
That’s all, three things. Now, Instagram wins at #1, and Pressgram wins at #2, and the both suck at #3.
That third one is the hardest, I guess, but what I want is that when I upload a file, it either makes an individual post or makes a gallery post of the whole day. And in both cases, I get the option of making a post publish right away or save it as a draft. I kind of love the idea of ‘This week in [Insta|Press]gram’ as a post for a photo blog. In looking at my options, I determined there’s one Pressgram plugin and a million Instagram, but none really do all of that.
But really … Pressgram 2.0 fixed most of my issues with UI, and for that I’m very happy about the new version. It’s easier to read and use, the layouts make sense. I’m even okay with the in-app purchases for things (though charging for some of the things Instagram offers for free strikes me as a poor call). Lacking the nice, snazzy filter names (imagine naming them after WP Themes) and borders/patterns means that if I want those in a quick way, I use Instagram and the maybe Pressgram to upload.
Except that isn’t what happens. I take a bunch of photos. At the end of the day I manually upload them all to my blog. Manually. What an annoying thing. I can’t do the one thing I want, which is make a gallery post. By default Pressgram 2 publishes my posts, so I have to use a plugin to not do that. Or I can use a plugin to import from Instagram (though again, it’s a single post per image). Of note, people recommended Instagrate to me, but it’s not Multisite compatible (says so on the plugin page) and that means it’s either poorly written or it’s doing something really wrong, since Multisite shouldn’t matter at all for that. Also it’s manual.
The best plugin I found was one that daily pulls in my Instagram pictures and saves them as draft, leaving me to manually merge and make a “This week in Instagram” gallery. There was another that can make a weekly post, but it’s old, out of date, and doesn’t actually save as draft anymore. There’s not really a perfect way to do that, though, as even the ‘import on demand’ plugins seem to have gaffs and time delays. Obviously Pressgram’s ‘Post direct’ method is going to be more precise, but even then it doesn’t have a ‘collect everything from a week’ if it’s going that.
I know I said the Honeymoon is over, but to be honest, I don’t know that it was ever here to begin with.
Comments
7 responses to “Whatevergram: The Honeymoon is over”
Have you considered using the WordPress mobile app? It won’t take care of 1, but it will take care of 2 and 3.
Regarding something like a weekly gallery post, I have done just that with the mobile app. I kept a draft, and for each photo I wanted to keep, I uploaded it to the draft, meaning that it was ready to publish when I was and I could delete the photo from my phone.
I never found the perfect solution for all 3 either, but shooting in the Camera app and immediately uploading in the WordPress app (and either publishing or adding to a draft) has become almost second nature to me.
@James: I dislike the iPhone app for making galleries. It doesn’t bring in my captions from the ‘grams, it doesn’t attach to the post, so I don’t get a real gallery, and worst of all, the publish date sometimes decides the day I started the post is the day I want to publish, even if I change the date.
Oomph, that publish date problem sounds nasty. 🙁
So… if you could do a batch publish of multiple images in either gallery or 1-by-1 format, that would be #3?
I can take a look into that.
@John Saddington: #3 is the complicated one. You know I love decisions, not options, but in the case of posting my images, I see it as this:
a) I want to post my images one photo at a time, like I’m Instagram, and have it EITHER publish or be a draft
b) I want to post multiple images to one post, and have it EITHER publish or be a draft
Both get complicated since really the best idea would have a API to not push my photos but pull them on a scheduled manner. “It’s Sunday, pull all posts from last Sunday morning to end of night Saturday, and put them all as attachments in one post. Then make my post content be
[gallery]and save it as a draft.”Also note that I just began tackling galleries for the Pressgram plugin last night.
Your review does have a few other good points we could chew on.
This ‘collect everything in a week’ concept intrigues me. I’d be interested to hear more on how you envision that. Now you’ve got my gears turning again.