AI Photo Auto-Tagging Pipeline for US Nonprofit
End-to-end photo automation for a New York nonprofit — photos posted in Slack are automatically downloaded, classified by Claude Vision AI, tagged with keywords, and uploaded to Lightroom Cloud. Zero manual tagging.
The Problem
Uptown Stories staff post 6-10 photos per workshop session across multiple weekly sessions. Every photo had to be manually downloaded, tagged with workshop name, age group, activity type, and composition details, and uploaded to Lightroom. With a tag list of 17 categories and a growing library of thousands of photos, the manual overhead was unsustainable. There was also no retroactive tagging on the existing library, making search nearly impossible.
The Solution
Built a multi-step Zapier automation triggered by Slack file uploads. The pipeline fetches the staff caption posted alongside the photos for context, downloads each image using the Slack bot API, sends both image and caption to Claude Vision API for intelligent classification, injects the returned keywords directly into the JPEG XMP metadata before upload, and pushes the fully tagged photo to Adobe Lightroom Cloud via the partner REST API — with a descriptive AI-generated filename replacing the original camera filename.
How It Works
Staff post photos in #social-media Slack channel with a caption describing the session
Zapier trigger fires instantly on each new file uploaded to the channel
Caption fetch step reads the message posted just before the photos for activity context
Image is downloaded from Slack using bot token authentication
Image and caption are sent to Claude Vision API with the full 17-tag classification prompt
Claude returns tags (Workshop, Group, Outside, Middle School etc.) plus a descriptive filename
Keywords are injected directly into the JPEG XMP metadata bytes before upload
Adobe OAuth token is refreshed automatically from Zapier Storage on every run
Asset is created in Lightroom Cloud catalog via Adobe partner REST API
Tagged image is uploaded — keywords appear instantly in Lightroom without any manual entry
Fallback path handles oversized images by using 1024px thumbnail for classification while uploading full resolution to Lightroom
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