The motivation for this post was last years announcement from Instagram that they were adding payments to it’s platform. Between the announcement and drafting this for posting, I got sidetracked with other work.

This is not “that” post about social media and commoditization of photography.

While adding payment infrastructure on Social Media is nothing new (see WeChat) this was a pretty interesting development for Photographers/Professionals making a living from photography – rather than just a way to advertise your work it could be potentially used as a direct revenue stream.

BUT, If you are a traditional kind of guy like me (old and jaded) and prefer images taken with real cameras, getting those images up to Instagram can be fairly arduous process – usually involving an intermediary step to the phone.

While trying to find a workflow of least resistance, I stumbled across Flume.app which (with Pro add on for $10) allows you to post from the desktop to Instagram – or for my case, directly from my image editor of choice, Capture One Pro.

This week there have been some really nice additions to Flume to streamline the posting workflow – the stand out for me being the meta data conversions (and the reason I decided to finish this post):

• IPTC Description is converted to the Instagram image caption
• If you include “@” with the users Instagram name in the description text, these are converted to mentions
• If images contain Keywords then these are converted to hashtags

Using Flume with Capture One Pro

• Install Flume 2.8.5 (with Pro add on)
• Open Capture One Pro and Select images (up to 10)

Just a tip, before the output step note that photos will be compressed to a maximum dimension of 1080px before uploading. If you would like to avoid Flume performing compression of high-resolution photos, or to avoid issues with color profiles, configure your workflow to export photos with a maximum dimension of 1080px.

There are some other limitations and some things to be aware of, but you can read more in the Flume Help:

Open With…

If the image is a format directly accepted by flume or if you want to do the final color/adjustments in Flume:

• Right click> Open with (and choose Flume as the Open with app)

Note the meta data needs to all ready be embedded in the file, so this is best if using already processed images.

Edit With…

If the image is RAW file (with settings) and you want the look and meta data in Capture One to open in Flume:

• Right click Edit with…
• Process the image to e.g. jpeg -this then opens the resulting file in Flume.

Images are now ready for posting!

Want Flume? Like this post? Buy via my referral link! It costs the same but I get small cut to help support this blog… which I’ll probably just spend on WordPress subscription renewals.