The SmugMug Automator is a Wordpress Plugin that will automate posting your photos from your SmugMug gallery to your blog. It does it as full posts, so you can easily create a Photo Blog.
Installation
Installing SmugMug Automator is easy, upload the file like any other plugin to your wp-content/plugins folder, and activate from the plugin control panel. Or use the new easy installer and upload the zip file directly to your plugin control panel and let Wordpress do it.
Settings
- List RSS Feeds – you can have multiple feeds. You’ll most likely only need to use your Recent Photos feed, but if you want only photos from a certain keyword to show up, you can use that keyword’s feed. You can even use 3 different keyword feeds, or feeds from multiple Smugmug sites!
- Post Content – you have the ability to customize the way the posts are made. There are variables you can put into your template for the title, a link, the photo itself.
- Post Frequency – Your choice of Every Hour, Twice Per Day, Once Per Day, Every 2 Days, Once Per Week.
- Post Category – Select the category you wish the photos to be put into (it’s best for them to have their own category, I use “Photo a Day”
- Exclude Keyword – You can choose one keyword that will prevent the photo being shown. I use event, because I don’t want my event photos coming up.. Imagine 100 days of the same event!
Controls
By default the plugin will check hourly for RSS feed updates. In fact, that part isn’t customizable. But in addition you can click the “Run Now” button to grab another photo from the feed. Each time the plugin only picks one photo to process.
If you wish to process all the photos in the feed, click the “Run Wild” button. Just note that the process of inserting the posts into the database takes time, so be patient. But it can be good to do when you first use the plugin, as it’ll queue up all the photos for you.
Scheduling
The plugin will first check the category selected for a post within the frequency you set, if it finds no photo it will publish a new post immediately. If it finds a photo already, it will schedule the post after the latest post in that category. So if you do a photo a day, and your feed has 30 photos in it, essentially you’ll have 30 days of photos queued up automatically. (but adding in one per hour unless you hit that Run Wild button).
Duplicates
The plugin will attempt to not post the same photo twice. It does this by comparing the title/caption and the post excerpt. It’s important not to change the excerpt otherwise it won’t know that the photo is the same. This is due to some photos having the same title even though they are different. Don’t worry though, the excerpt is just the photo thumbnail so it should go nice with your theme.
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