Best IFTTT Recipes to Make the Most of Your Vacation
When you go on vacation, you can explore a new place and get away from the hustle and bustle of the day. Of course, taking a vacation takes a fair amount of prep work, and the super useful IFTTT tool can help with that.
We’ve covered a little If This, Then That (IFTTT). If you are not familiar with it, check out this guide . In short, IFTTT links different web applications to automate tasks between them. Save tagged Facebook photos to Dropbox . Use email to call your phone when you lose it . The possibilities are almost endless and IFTTT is great for when you want to go offline and enjoy your vacation to the fullest.
Save travel emails in one place
When you plan a trip, you get all sorts of emails: flight receipts, sightseeing suggestions from friends, hotel confirmations, and more. The list goes on. You can of course create a dedicated “vacation” folder and tag these letters accordingly. For even easier access, use this IFTTT recipe to automatically send flagged emails to Evernote.
This is useful because you don’t need to log into email to check your routes while traveling. You can easily access them offline through Evernote. Plus, you can easily share information with others: just give them access to your Evernote folder. If you and your spouse are planning a trip , for example, and each of you receives travel-related emails, you both can use an IFTTT recipe to save all those emails in one Evernote notebook. This way you don’t have to switch between accounts. Everything in one place.
Let’s say you don’t have Evernote and are using Dropbox or Drive. Just change the Then This (Action Feed) recipe part from Evernote to Dropbox or Drive. It’s worth noting that the previously mentioned TripIt app is also great for organizing all your travel plans. These IFTTT recipes are just as good and can be handy to organize with the apps you’re already using.
Control your smart devices at home
Smart home devices are generally useful, but they come in most handy when you are away for a long time. You can manage their settings remotely and turn them on as soon as you go on vacation. What’s more, this IFTTT recipe will automatically activate your smart home devices as soon as your vacation starts.
Create a Google Calendar event called Vacation and once it starts, your Wink app will automatically lock your doors and set your thermostat. No Wink? You can configure Action Channel to work with any number of smart home devices. For instance:
- Turn on the hue light
- Set up the Nest thermostat
- Adjust the tado thermostat
- Turn on your Camio camera
If your device has an IFTTT channel , you can link it to your calendar, or even your location, to automatically turn on your device. And when you get home, you can use IFTTT to schedule the same devices to turn off.
Let people know when you have landed
If your parents are anything like mine, they still care about you, even if you grew up and travel on your own. They love it when I contact them whenever I get to their destination so they know I’m safe and this recipe can do it automatically so I don’t forget or bother them.
It uses your location to send an email to your chosen contacts – friends who need to pick you up from the airport, your spouse home, or your crazy, overprotective parents. You can also set up an action feed to send text instead.
Automatically save vacation photos
With this IFTTT recipe, you can automatically save travel photos to Evernote. When you save an Instagram photo to a specific location, the recipe will add that photo to your Evernote notebook. This way, you can separate your travel photos from the rest of your photos and even share them with friends and family while on vacation. Here are some similar recipes:
- Upload New iOS Photos to Google Drive
- Upload Android Photos to Google Drive
- Upload Android Photos to Dropbox
- Upload new iOS photos to Dropbox
- Automatically mark photos uploaded to a specific Dropbox URL as “Vacation”.
These recipes will help you organize your vacation photos while traveling. There are photo sharing apps like Google Photos that can organize your photos into albums as well. But this happens automatically, so when you return, you have nothing to disassemble.
Receive only the most important emails and phone calls
When you’re on vacation, you probably don’t want to be available to anyone, much less your boss or coworkers. With this recipe, you get a text notification when you receive emails from specific addresses. Set it up to receive emails from contacts of your choice, such as your family members or specific VIPs. That way, you can safely disconnect from your email without worrying about one urgent email that might merit your attention even when you’re on vacation.
If you’re traveling to a place where cellular connectivity is fuzzy but you have Wi-Fi, this recipe might come in handy. It sends you an email when you receive a missed call. Better yet, set up a recipe to only receive missed call emails from specific phone numbers .
Keep track of your vacation expenses
You may be traveling for business and have expenses that need to be written off. Maybe you just want to keep track of your spending so your vacation doesn’t drain your bank account. Anyway, with this recipe, you can automatically save your receipts to a Google Drive spreadsheet. Just take a photo of the receipt and save it to an album called “Receipts,” and IFTTT will make sure it is added to Drive. Customize the trigger to customize the recipe to work with Android. Here are Dropbox and Evernote versions of the same recipe.
You can also save receipts for online purchases. This recipe searches your email for online receipts and stores them in a spreadsheet in Google Drive.
IFTTT is a useful tool for your day to day activities and tasks, but it’s even better when you’re on vacation and presumably away from your computer and devices. Prepare some recipes before your trip and then enjoy your vacation.