I’m not really on Instagram. I have an account, but I don’t really use it. I thought to myself, “How hard would it be to make a little website that I can easily post photos to from my iPhone?”. It wasn’t that hard. Here is an overview of what I did:

  1. Setup Apache on a spare server
  2. On DNS server, setup AAAA record for the web server’s ipv6 address.
  3. Setup Postfix and Dovecot on the spare server
  4. On DNS server, setup MX record to point to spare server
  5. On spare server, setup procmail to process incoming e-mails. I’ll replace procmail at some point as it is no longer maintained.
  6. With procmail recipe, identify messages from me that contain a photo and pass the email to a processing script written in Python
  7. In processing script, strip out EXIF info and save photo. Also save metadata (e-mail subject is caption, body is description)
  8. After processing, kick off another Python script to rebuild the photos site. Script creates thumbnails for photos and assembles dead simple HTML pages that have 10 photos a piece.
  9. On iPhone, setup a new e-mail account with credentials from the spare server.
  10. From iPhone Photos app, select a photo and e-mail it to the special account on the spare server so that it will be posted.

Voila! You can see the result at https://stu.photos