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How to setup SM Tasker to monitor a folder

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Updated
ByFinley S

SM Tasker is capable of automatically picking up new posts from a folder so you don’t need to go and create new posts inside it, all you need is to create the content and drop it into a folder. It works really well and it’s easy to set up so let’s see how you can do this.

You can choose between using a Dropbox folder or a normal folder. SM Tasker will add the pictures to your campaign automatically and will detect the new ones and add them as well if you ever decided to add more in the next few days.

Adding a folder that contains your images:

Now we will see how to use the Monitor Folders feature step by step:

  1. Go to your campaign, click on the “What To Publish” tab, then click on the “MONITOR FOLDERS” tab, and after that click on the ‘BROWSE’ button (shown as numbers 1, 2, and 3 from the screenshot below) then select your folder, and its path will be added to the box below the ‘Browse’ button:

(Screenshot showing What to publish tab –> Monitor Folder Tab)

 

  1. Create your post template (referred to as number 4 from the screenshot below), the template supports the TOKENS below the text box, we will explain how the TOKENS work at the end of this tutorial so don’t worry about that for now.

(Screenshot showing the sections of the Monitor Folders Tab)

  1. If you are posting to Pinterest as well, you can use Source Url Template (number 5) to link your pin to your website. For that, when they click on your link they will be redirected to your website.
  2. If you want to extract videos from inside the folder, make sure you check this box (number 6)
  3. Once you are done with your Post Template, you can then click on ‘ADD FOLDER’ button (number 7), then SM Tasker will add the folder path to the table shown in the screenshot below, where you can be more specific about the extract operation using the options you have on the right side of the table:

(Screenshot showing one folder path added and the options we have there)

 

  1. Now, all you have to do is click START from the right side of the table for SM Tasker to start extracting from your folder.

But wait, what about “we will explain how the TOKENS work at the end of this tutorial so don’t worry about that for now.” ?

Here are the Tokens that are available for images and videos files:

From the screenshot below, we can see that we can use the following tokens:

  • [FILENAME]
  • [FOLDERNAME]
  • [META_TITLE]
  • [META_COMMENTS]
  • [META_TAGS]
  • [META_SUBJECT]

(Screenshot showing the tips that explain how to extract from the folders)

 

Let’s explain what every token can be used for:

[FILENAME] Will be replaced with the name of the image or video that got extracted.

[FOLDERNAME] Will be replaced with the name of the folder containing the image or video.

To use the Metadata Tokens we will need to customize our image METADATA

How to modify our images META DATA:

  1. Right-click on the image then click Properties
  2. Click on the “Details” tab and then hover over the detail value you wish to change or edit and a box will appear where you can type your customize info (See screenshot below)

 

Once you are done editing your photos, add them to your folder and import the folder to SM Tasker using the ‘Browse’ button at the “Monitor Folder” tab as we explained at the beginning of this tutorial, add the METADATA tokens you want to use to your template, then click on ‘Add Folder’ button and SM Tasker will take it from there.

Don’t forget to click Start as we explained before.

How do the TOKENS work:

Let’s say for example you edited the meta title of one of your images and you used the Token [META_TITLE], SM Tasker will replace it with the value you gave the title on the image file.

 

Here is how it will show in your “Posts List” tab after the images are extracted:

 

(Screenshot showing the tokens replaced by their value on the “History” tab for some posts)

As you can see the second post doesn’t have any text because we didn’t add anything in the Image >> Properties >> Details.

How to create a post with multiple images from a sub-folder:

All you have to do is to add the photos you wish to use for that post in a sub-folder (put them in a folder inside the original folder you want to import using the ‘Browse’ button).

Your text post will be extracted from the Meta Data of an image that you must name “primary” if it is not available SM Tasker will use the Meta Data of the first (alphabetically) file on the sub-folder.

You can name your images 1,2,3.. on the sub-folder and SM Tasker will extract the Meta Data of image 1 and make sure you have the following box checked:

 

(Screenshot showing a path added with the option to add a post with multiple images highlighted).

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