Social, drafts of posts that show the work
Sketchbook has a Social section. Claude drafts a post from a notebook page, with its photos prepared for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or X, and the post goes out from the phone’s own share sheet. Sketchbook itself never publishes anything.
The request, on 17 October: “I would like a social media section on this, I would like to start showcasing my work on social media”. The idea is simple. Getting finished and half-finished work in front of people is a reason to keep going with it. The first example was a longboard deck in the making, with the accounting software to follow.
A draft, made from a page
Each draft belongs to one notebook page and holds:
- the account it is for, and the platform: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or X;
- a caption and hashtags, with a live count against that platform’s own limit;
- photos chosen from that page, in the order they will appear;
- a status: Draft, Ready or Posted. Marking it Posted records the date, and the link to the post can be pasted in.
The limits come from each platform’s own help pages and developer documents, read on the day: 2,200 characters, up to five hashtags and up to 20 photos on Instagram, 3,000 characters on LinkedIn, 280 on X counted the way X counts them, and up to four photos there. Facebook publishes no caption limit, so Sketchbook only shows the count.
Photos ready for the platform
The server prepares every photo itself. Instagram gets one crop for the whole post, portrait (4 by 5) or square, 1080 pixels wide, because Instagram uses one shape for every photo in a post. The other platforms can keep the photo as taken or use the same crops. Each photo has a slider for where the crop sits. A prepared photo carries no hidden information: no location, no camera details, no date.
Posting it
Nothing in Sketchbook posts. On the phone and the tablet, “Share to Instagram” first copies the caption, then opens Android’s share sheet with every photo, and the screen says why: Instagram drops a caption handed to it with shared photos, so it has to be pasted in. The other platforms work the same way. On the web there is Download photos, for one at a time or all of them in a zip, and Copy caption.
Personal and business accounts
Every draft says which account it is for, in amber for the personal account and in cyan for a business page, on every row, at the top of the draft and beside the Share button. The two are never meant to look alike.
- Personal is the default. Claude can write and edit a personal draft, but only the person it belongs to marks it Posted.
- Business pages (SAE Engineering, SAE Books and Tasur) are different. Later the same day the instruction came: “you can have access to post on the non-personal accounts”. So Claude, which already posts to those pages by hand, may mark a business draft Posted and record its link.
Claude can never move a draft from one account to another, and cannot delete a draft. The list of accounts is configuration, so adding one is one line.
Kept private
The private journal is never a source. A journal page cannot be the page a draft shows, and no file a journal page has ever held can be one of its photos, even if the same picture sits on another page as well. This is checked by the server every time a draft is read, previewed or downloaded, not only when it is made.
Not yet
Posting through the platforms’ own programming interfaces, scheduling, and anything automatic are not part of this release. Nothing has been tried on a real phone or tablet yet.