Schedule Photos to Post Automatically with Postbot
Schedule photos to appear on your site automatically, with Postbot.
We’re big fans of photography here at WordPress.com, and we know that a lot of you are, too. Sometimes we’ll take a bunch of photos and want to post them, one at a time, spread over several days. Doing this manually is time-consuming and, let’s be honest, a little boring.
To help this situation we created Postbot, a photo scheduling app that allows you to quickly upload and schedule multiple photos.
Postbot will create a post for each photo and schedule it to appear at a certain time over a given number of days. This is the ideal way to share a lot of photos without having to manually create and schedule each one.
Postbot is a stand-alone application that works with your WordPress.com blog, and your Jetpack-powered WordPress.org blog. You can use it from your desktop or mobile browser.
How to use Postbot
To use Postbot, go to postbot.co and click on the Connect with WordPress.com button. If you’re not logged in to WordPress.com, you’ll be asked to log in. If you are logged in, you’ll be asked to grant access to Postbot.
Then drag and drop a bunch of photos onto the page. If you’re on a mobile device you can click on the upload button to open your photos.
You can edit photo details while they upload — there’s no need to wait.
When everything is ready just pick a schedule — a start date and the number of days between each photo — and we’ll do the rest. If you want to exclude the weekends then that’s fine too.
It’s worth re-iterating that Postbot works on both WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs. For WordPress.org you’ll need the Jetpack plugin installed and the JSON API module enabled.
For the technically minded, Postbot was created using the WordPress.com API. All of the code is available on Github and is released under a GPL license. We’ll be writing a follow-up post explaining some of the details on the WordPress.com developer blog.
- April 22, 2014
- Better Blogging, Features
WordPress.com News 
I schedule 99% of my posts so this is interesting to me. I am having a problem with my copy a post button. Where can I get help for that?
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You can find Postbot-specific help on the support page, and if that doesn’t answer your question then drop us a line and we’ll take it from there.
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This is fantastic news!! And much needed too 🙂 looking forward to using Postbot
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That’s a cool app!
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Reblogged this on Automattically Kraft and commented:
Super simple and works on Jetpack-powered sites too!
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Awesome, very handy
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This is a good thing for people like me who writes a lot of stuff and schedule them on certain dates.
Keep up the good work WP !!!
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Good idea; will have to look at this more. You can already schedule your post to publish on a particular date/time.
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It sounds very interesting… I have to try it!
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Wow! Tres cool.
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Very Cool 🙂 Thank you!
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This is very interesting, and sounds like a very cool and easy to use feature. I suspect that this is simply for posting images and does not include text?
Either way, I’ll have to give it a try. Thanks for the tip John!
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Hope you find it useful! You can include text and tags along with the photo too. The photos will be scheduled on your blog just like normal posts, so you can also edit them afterwards and get the full WordPress post editor, if you need to do something more advanced.
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Amazing, thanks so much for the additional info. Sounds great.
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This is wonderful! A lot easier than what I have had to do up till now. Thanks so much ! love this new techie tool!
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Great idea and innovation…well done! Keep it up!
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Reblogged this on blogagaini and commented:
I am a big advocate on scheduling posts with WordPress, but check out the new Postbot App by WordPress. A W E S O M E ! ! !
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Sounds fantastic. Can it read the Caption metadata and post that as well?
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It can’t, but that’s a really good suggestion and I’ll see if it can be added.
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I haven’t looked yet (but I think the concept is fantastic idea, well done) but could someone tell me if the lowest posting range is 1 per day or can you schedule it to post multiple times per day spread across the 24 hour day (a bit like Tumblr does with Queued posts)?
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Currently the smallest time unit is 1 day, but that’s an interesting idea and we’ll look into having an hour unit.
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I can’t wait to try this! If it works well, it will save me so much time! Thank you!
PS I use the Gridspace theme for my photography site. With this theme I have to set the “feature image” in order for the image to be visible. I’m hoping that with Postbot I won’t have to set the feature image.
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Postbot doesn’t set the featured image yet, but we have it listed as a feature request so hopefully soon!
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Why did Automattic choose to create Postebot as a stand-alone application as opposed to making it part of WordPress.com blogs? Do you plan to create a mobile app for Postebot in the future?
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Postbot lets us provide a very targeted set of features to anyone with a WordPress.com or WordPress.org/Jetpack blog (or both), from one central place. It’s already mobile-ready so a special mobile app isn’t currently planned.
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Nice work! I’m only missing the option to set category…. 🙂
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Planned for a future version 🙂
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Just gave it a try and did the final edits (including featured image) in the blog draft as per normal. Saves a bit of time and is almost there – very useful for us bloggers that build the article around images. Thanks mate!
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Nice! Sounds ridiculously easy! Will you have option to prepare everything (including text) offline and upload the next time we have internet connection?
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Yes, Postbot keeps your photo and text until you schedule it on a blog.
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Hi John, I jumped onto this last night after finding your post. Have scheduled a few pictures just to test it out, and the first one was supposed to publish this morning about 2-3hours ago but never did. I changed the time, to see if maybe it posts then, which didn’t work, and now have tried to publish it manually, but i can’t seem to do that either.. Please let me know if I’m missing something somewhere? TX 🙂
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Hi! I think you’ve deleted the troubled photo already, and your others look like they are scheduled fine. Can you get in touch via support and we’ll try and figure it out?
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Thanks for reply.. I think it’s time zones that got us mixed up here.. There seems to be 3hours between WordPress and my time 😉 ..will play with it and let you know if there’s still a problem!
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Your photos will be scheduled in the timezone that your blog is set to. If you haven’t set this then you can do so from your general settings
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Reblogged this on allendav and commented:
Load up the photo hopper and let it run! New from WordPress.com 🙂
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Fantastic! Thank you! This is just what I needed for my photography blog – I’ve just tried it out, scheduled a week’s worth of posts all in one go and it was so much easier this way! I used to do it manually, having to enter a date for each one and keep track of where I’d got to – you’ve made my photo blogging life much easier! (The only thing that would make it even more perfect is if I could add categories and tags from the Postbot window. And yes, I can see that it’s possible to add tags, but they don’t autocomplete so not really helpful in my case – I use lots of different tags and rely on the autocomplete to help me remember what I called them.)
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Oh, boo! I just realised – the scheduled posts would have gone on my main blog! Eep! Have just deleted them all. Is there any way we can set it to go on a different blog and not our main one?
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Yes, you can pick another blog from the dropdown menu in the top right corner.
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Thanks! I found it! #veryhappycamper
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