I started the day working through the setup for a gotosocial server. It took a little fussing with the Synology, but it’s up and running. There’s a little more to it than “because I could,” but not much. I think I’ll find a few things to follow from there that are not humans with feelings and see how well it runs before moving there.
But that made me start thinking about imgup and how it’d be kind of cool to be able to use it to post to Fediverse services. So imgup 0.10.0 does that by adding a way to enroll it with gotosocial as an app then adding it as an option when posting to Flickr or Smugmug.
Nothing has changed about the way it has traditionally worked:
imgup -c "Some caption/the alt text" --tags some,tags -b flickr imgfile000.jpg
… but if you register it with gotosocial, you can add the --post
and --fedi
switches to compose the post text and make a post.
imgup -c "Some caption" --tags some,tags -b flickr imgfile000.jpg --fedi --post "the text of your post"
You can run the OAuth setup for that up with imgup setup fedi
.
v0.11.0, which I have not full tested offers a simplifed flow to sign imgup to use your Mastodon instance, and adds the --mastodon
switch, which behaves the same way.
So, it’s becoming a little bit of a Swiss Army Knife:
- Use it to upload photos to Flickr or SmugMug and get back a snippet you can paste into your blog
- Use it to post photos to those services and also make a Fediverse post out of them
- Use it to just post to the Fediverse
When you use Flickr or SmugMug alongside creating a post, you get to take advantage of their image resizing, which is nicer than a lot of blog hosting services: The images being shared are optimized without being turned into mush.
I’ve got a few ideas about extending it to support Bluesky and Pixelfed. Bluesky would behave a lot more like the Mastodon or gotosocial functionality. Pixelfed has a few other features around albums and stories worth considering. Adding those sort of turns it into an image cross-posting tool for services open enough to work with one.