Automatically Uploading Photos to a Website

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To display animated GIFs on Facebook or in an email which contains a link to the image instead of an attachment you need to upload the photos to a website and provide the URL in the message text. Many FTP clients have the option to automatically sync the contents of a folder on the local PC with a folder on a remote server using FTP. Two free options are FTPbox and GoodSync. There are too many commercially available syncing FTP clients to list here, but one simple to use option is NetDrive which allows you to mount a folder from a remote computer as a Windows drive.

WARNING: Please take great care when automatically syncing folders to a remote server to ensure you don't accidentally erase important files from your webserver or compromise your website's security.

Example: Setup a syncing FTP client to sync the contents of the prints folder from a photo booth with a folder on your webserver and then email a link to the image on the webserver.

Folder on the PC: C:\users\Chris\PhotoboothImages\2015-11-10\prints

URL of remote folder on webserver: http://www.breezesys.com/photos

When the photobooth software prints the photos it saves a JPEG copy of the print output on the prints folder (C:\users\Chris\PhotoboothImages\2015-11-10\prints) and the syncing FTP client will automatically upload it to the photos folder on the webserver. If the JPEG filename is 20151101_223012.jpg the URL of the image on the webserver will be http://www.breezesys.com/photos/20151101_223012.jpg

A link to the photo can be included in the email by using the {fullFilename} token which returns the full filename of the image without the folder i.e. 20151101_223012.jpg

The HTML email text needs to be set to something like this:

Your photo booth photos taken on %L

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When the email is sent this will be converted to:

Your photo booth photos taken on Tuesday, November 10, 2015

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