A friend of mine has a book publishing business and have customers all over the country who sell these books. They're old-school companies that has always relied on paper forms and fax to send orders, but now that they have the WhatsApp on their mobile phones, and they write their requirements on paper, take a picture and send it via the WhatsApp. In this aspect, the images are saved the WhatsApp contained on the computer, print and send it to the relevant departments for processing.
The problem with the workflow is that there are quite a few steps involved after receiving the WhatsApp image. Since the WhatsApp desktop client does not provide nor do they allow integration with services such as IFTTT or Zapier, and images from her manually transferred from the phone to your computer to send to the printer. Is there a way to automate these steps? Yes really.
When an image, or any media file, and received into the WhatsApp, it is automatically saved to the phone memory material. It is loaded and media without having to open the corresponding message (We are dealing here with the Android, the iPhone version of the WhatsApp may work differently).
And now we know that the image file contained on the SD card phone, all we need is a way to automatically transfer the file to our computer. As Dropbox or Google Drive can help.
Downloading WhatsApp Photos to Computer
You could watch the media folder of the WhatsApp Once a new file is added to this folder, automatically synced with Dropbox. MetaCtrl have Android apps to Dropbox, Google Drive and a box that can help here.
#1: Open your Dropbox and create a folder, say WhatsApp.
#2: Launch the DropSync app and authorize it to access your Dropbox account.
#3: Set the Local (watch) folder as /storage/emulated/0/WhatsApp/Media/WhatsApp Images and set the Dropbox folder as the one that you created in Step #1.
#4: Set the sync method as “Upload only” so that it is not a 2-way sync and only WhatsApp images are sent to Dropbox but not the other way.
#5: Go to the app settings and change the Autosync Interval to 5 minutes (the default is an hour).
This is. Within minutes you get a picture on the WhatsApp, it will be sent to your own Dropbox account in the cloud, and since you have Dropbox works on your desktop, too, will load the image on the computer as well.
Automatically Printing the WhatsApp Photos
The next step is to send these pictures from Dropbox folder to the printer connected to the computer.
This is not hard, too. You can open this script Windows printing on the computer, it will automatically send photos from Dropbox folder to the printer. A similar option is remote printing is available for Mac and Linux as well.
Please note, however, that this will download and print all the photos of WhatsApp so you want to have a human layer that ignores those unnecessary.
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