Every day at around 4:00 p.m. I get an email, via IFTTT (IF This Then That, a free web service that glues disparate services on the web together in interesting ways), that contains a digest of the Instagram photos taken in my neighbourhood in the last 24 hours.

The recipe (that’s what IFTTT called “rules for routing stuff from one place to another,” in this case from Instagram to my email) looks like this (you can add it to your own IFTTT account, with your own location, if you like):

And here are thumbnails of the photos that I received today (the actual email from IFTTT contains larger images, with links to the Instagram originals)

Instagram’s method for figuring out where a photo was taken is, to some extent, reliant on the user to identify the location; that’s why there are beach and cliffs photos in the mix,

But, that aside, I find this daily digest provides me with an interesting insight into what people – Instagram-using people, at least – find interesting in the area where I work and live.

(The images above are from the following Instagram users: audreyannej, chloemahar, cohenmcdonald, darinmuck, dmwedge, dong_zheming, everythingeverywhere, factorypei, haleyhbu_, ibaadshah101, ilovemoonsnail, kalkalkal, katkruger, kissthebride1, lauethier, lauradawnclerk, libigatti, lingerietop28, lsquiresiv, madisonmcginniss, mfabaughen, miss_emilysarah, rebelrebelgrrl, ruk, ryan_cheverie, salitabacchi_henry, soxmerry, sreevatsan, taylorgill7, theguildpei, thekettleblackpei, theqasimkhan, timothydanielob, triple7presents, and wallace_katie).

On a technical note, I used the excellent ripMIME utility to decode the MIME email I get from IFTTT into an HTML file, and then ripped the images ouf of that with Firefox to produce the collage about with GraphicConverter.