I added a format option to the imgup CLI, so it’ll provide a snippet in either org, Markdown, or HTML markup now, matching what it can do from the web interface. Also realized I don’t have a “picture of the week” feature anymore, so I replaced that part of the menu with a direct link to the Smugmug target album in the Smugmug management UI. Great for quickly getting to a bunch of test photos and removing them.
Next on the todo list:
- Wire it into Raycast for quick “upload this image and return a snippet” action.
- Figure out if there’s a way to make a Photos sharing action out of it, too.
To restate the problem imgup started out solving:
You never know what your blog hosting provider is going to do to your photos when you upload them. Gnarly compression, weird image renames, path rewrites, maybe they don’t even support image uploads and you’re left to your own devices for hosting. Move your blog, and the images are probably going to break if you were depending on any provider magic at all.
So … skip all that. If you have an image hosting service you already like, and if they specialize in treating your photographs well, use ’em!
imgup just takes a photo, uploads it to a hidden (but not private) album, and returns a snippet of Markdown, org, or HTML you can paste into your blog post, complete with alt text if you provide it.
The command line tool is a recent addition because the “open web UI, select, upload, copy, paste” workflow is fine given how many steps it saves otherwise, but a CLI option is even more efficient (and automatable).
The thing imgup can’t solve is using it to do something besides share screenshots of things that make blogging easier. Lately we’ve been verging into “blogging about things that make blogging easier” territory, and that feels icky.