Tweed and Flickr: Posting Photos on Twitter

Tweed, one of the two Twitter apps available for webOS, recently added the ability to publish photos via an email 'workaround.' The way it essentially works is to create a new email with an attached photo that you send to one of several services that take your subject line and turn it into the tweet.  Many people have expressed a wish for it to be a little more directly integrated into the client - but for the way I like to publish my photos, it's just about as ideal as could be right now.

Why is that?  Because I prefer to publish my photos to Flickr -- I've been doing it for years now and am not keen on the idea of having yet another repository of my casual photos.  Well, Flickr recently added a new beta where you can email a photo to a specialized address at Flickr and they'll post it to your Twitter stream along with the subject line.

I've used Flickr's email / twitter service a couple of times, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted as it didn't provide me with a character count to let me know if I was going over the character limit. It also didn't fit 'conceptually' to go to my email client to post a photo to Flickr.

Tweed's implementation of emailed photos works exactly like you'd expect it to. Once you've entered your secret 'Flickr to Twitter' address in Tweed's settings, you can simply hit the photo button on a new tweet to either choose an existing photo or take a new one.  Tweed then lets you compose your tweet (Tweed takes into account the number of characters the image url will use) and then when you hit tweet, it automatically creates an email draft that you can click send on.  Easy Peasy.  Taking the above photo of the "Sea of Blue Bins" from the Smartphone Experts warehouse and posting it to Twitter took all of 1 minute.

Since I prefer Flickr for photos and Flickr doesn't yet work directly with any Twitter clients (to my knowledge), for now this is the single best way for me to tweet my pics.  Hopefully someday soon Flickr and Tweed will be able to work together more elegantly without the need to call up the email client.

Oh, one other reason I like using Flickr and Tweed: it helps with the PreCentral.net forum campaign to help move the Pre up in Flickr's most used camera rankings. Join us! :)