About a week ago, our Interactive Team got a fresh (the kids are still using “fresh”, right?) TV for our office space . The primary use is to screen share what we are currently working on via an Apple TV. That way we don’t have to crowd around one of our monitors when we’re reviewing work or brainstorming. But we quickly realized that when the team isn’t doing that, it’s just a really expensive screensaver. Well, it took only 5 minutes to get tired of the stock images of flowers and animals that the Apple TV comes with. So we needed something better…we got the idea to pull in images from dribbble. We started asking around, and few friends gave us the idea of using IFTTT to automatically pull them in. Here’s what we did.
Step 1 – Dropbox:
You’re going to need a Dropbox account, if you don’t have one, hit yourself in the face with your fist, because Dropbox is so last year.
Step 2 – IFTTT:
You’re also going to need an account at IFTTT. A quick rundoown of IFTTT is that you build recipies from all of the different web services they can hook into. Each recipe consists of 2 parts: If [action happens on a web service] then [go do something on another web service]. If that doesn’t make sense you can always learn more.
Step 3 – Gather your ingredients:
To make our recipies, you’ll need to turn on some of the channels on your IFTTT account. Go here and activate the RSS Feed Channel, the Dropbox Channel and if you want to pull in Instagram images like we did, activate the Instagram Channel (you will need an Instagram account).
Step 4 – Go to the bathroom:
We don’t want any accidents due to the excitement of the next few steps 
Step 5 – Recipies:
What our recipies do is anytime a new item is added to the dribbble popular feed, we download it to a folder on dropbox (ours is called…dribbble). We do the same thing for a couple of different Instagram users, just to spice things up (BAM!). Building your own recipies is simple, but if you want the ones we are using, here ya go (dribbble & Instagram).
Step 6 – Screensaver Stuff:
If this screensaver is for anything other than an Apple TV, point it at the Dropbox folder, and you are done. For Apple TV, keep reading. First, you need to turn on photo sharing on your computer that has the Dropbox folder. Open iTunes, and click Advanced (along the top bar on a Mac). Then, select “Choose Photos to Share” and select your Dropbox folder. Then, on your Apple TV, go to Computers and add your Apple ID. Now, you can go to the screensaver, and choose Photo Stream as the source for your screensaver. Good luck. When you are done, here is the result:
A couple of tips:
- At the beginning of the week, I delete all of the stuff from last week. Sometimes, it’s hard to let go, but this screensaver isn’t for nostalgia; it’s for inspiration. Bring on some new stuff!
- If you want to use Instagram, you have to create a recipe per user. We have 3 or 4 different ones going.
- You aren’t limited to just dribbble or Instagram, IFTTT can also hook up to Flickr or any other photo streaming service that has an rss feed.
- Apple TV doesn’t automatically update as new images come in, so you have to stop the screensaver and repeat Step 6 from above. And make sure your iTunes is open when it is refreshing the feed.
- We used the screensaver mode “Shifting Tiles.” It doesn’t stretch the dribbble images out too far, and doesn’t move to fast–a dangerous screensaver combo.
If you end up making this screensaver, let us know in the comments with some cool screenshots.
Hey guys !
I have made my recipe on IFTTT, linked my dribble, instagram and twitter account with DropBox but i do you make it a screensaver ?
HELP !
Thanks
Bart
Hi Bart,
You need to go to your screensaver settings. Choose a photo slideshow screensaver and set that new Dropbox folder as the one to be used for the screensaver. If you are still having problems, tell us what operating system your computer is using (is it Mac or Windows?).
Thanks!
Good day!!
This is such a good idea, instead of using the one repetitious screensaver in our monitor. But, it would be much better if there’s an apps that covers all the steps mentioned above. I am suggesting that just to make it user-friendly to people who are interested with this method.
Has anyone done something like this for Windows? I like this concept but I have not found any sort of screensaver for Windows that is similar.
For windows, you would follow all of the same steps above. For the screensaver, you just need to pick a slideshow screensaver and point it to your dropbox folder. Here are the instructions for how to do it on an XP version of Windows, but I imagine it is close the same for newer ones too. http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/display_set_picture_as_screensaver.mspx?mfr=true
Why bother saving to Dropbox and then sharing that folder out to the Apple TV (which requires a computer as middleman, as well as manual refeshing) when you can just have IFTTT save the photos directly to a dedicated Flickr account that the AppleTV can stream photos from? Because saving to and streaming from Flickr works a lot better.
Josh, you are my new best friend. We hadn’t thought of that idea at all. Our only concerns with going that route, would be that we don’t have a Flickr Pro account, and we would go over the monthly upload limits pretty quickly. But, it is still a great idea!
I use Flickr to Apple TV without a pro account. I just use IFTT to send it my personal instagram feed, and due to the limits of 200 flickr photos on my account, it actually self-curates to only show my more recent photos. Fun to post a picture at lunch then find it in my screensaver that afternoon!
So glad to assist here, Scott, and happy to make a new friend.
IFTTT.com (and also “newcomer” ibeam.it) are the real savior assistants here, linking up various cloud services in ways that benefit us… the combinations of ingredients has some staggering impact and the possibilities seem nearly endless.
Feeding photos from numerous sources, into Flickr (all without requiring us, or our computers, as middlemen, to do any manual housekeeping) is a great thing indeed. Especially since the AppleTV has limited options when it comes to streaming photos (a LAN-connected computer, PhotoStream, or Flickr.)
For this purpose, I created a separate, private Flickr account. (It’s a totally private photo gallery, for me and my AppleTV’s only.) You can go to Flickr’s privacy settings and uncheck the “Hide me from site-wide searches on flickr.com and on 3rd party sites that use the API” box for a moment, go to the Flickr app on the AppleTV and add your own username as a Flickr Contact, and then you can go back to Flickr.com and check that box to hide it again.
I couldn’t see a way to upload to separate Flickr “folders” or albums, but I also didn’t explore too deeply. Luckily it’s easy to create multiple free Flickr accounts. Now it would be nice to see IFTTT.com allow us to link to/choose between multiple Flicker accounts, for different purposes. Because right now all you can do is link to one. I guess you could create a separate IFTTT.com accounts, but that might be getting a lil’ crazy…