Last time it was 6 platforms, and I said two things were "still pending external API review" — TikTok + LinkedIn company pages.
I stopped waiting for the approval. I routed them through Buffer instead → THEY'RE LIVE. 🎉
📡 NOW 9 PLATFORMS, VIDEO + PHOTO — one post, real clickable links on every one:
✅ YouTube ·
✅ Facebook ·
✅ Instagram ·
✅ LinkedIn (personal)
✅ X (Twitter) — via Buffer (free; X killed its free API, so I refuse to pay)
✅ Pinterest — via Buffer (free), live board selection
✅ Google Business Profile 🏢 — NEW (auto-posts a CLEAN keyframe; Google rejects watermarked photos so the engine strips the watermark just for GBP)
✅ TikTok 🎵 — NEW (was "pending API review" → routed via Buffer, live now)
✅ LinkedIn COMPANY page ⚜️ — NEW (same move — no Community Management API approval needed)
I posted ONE video, and it landed on all 9, each with the real link back to the live post. Validated end-to-end.
🎨 THE COLOR MACHINE (this was literally my "🔜 Next" last update — it shipped, and then some):🔹 Per-device LUTs — DJI Mini 4 Pro (D-Log), OnePlus 15, Samsung S20 — 20 .cube profiles, applied in the SAME single ffmpeg pass as the watermark (one encode, zero extra quality loss).🔹 DaVinci-style sliders — Highlights, Details, Temperature, and the "tame the island whites" control I wanted. My exact island look saved as a one-tap preset.🔹
🤿 AUTOMATIC UNDERWATER CORRECTION — the big one for a divemaster. It reads the water color frame-by-frame and pulls the green/cyan out so reefs and sand look real. Runs server-side in the same pass.
🎬 IT BECAME A REAL EDITING APP (not just a pipe):🔹 Cockpit UI — source + live preview + color + watermark on ONE screen, watermark rendered on YOUR actual frame (not a fake mockup).🔹 ✂️ Trim — drag IN/OUT handles, keep just the best segment, frame-accurate, the rest cut before publishing.🔹
▶️ Watch-by-the-minute — loop any minute of the clip to pick your moments.🔹 🎯 Exact preview — see the REAL engine render (LUT + underwater + watermark) BEFORE you post.🔹 💾 Save-back — the finished master drops right back into Google Drive.
🌐 Captions now FR / EN / ES (added Spanish for the Honduran + cruise crowd) — auto-picked per platform.
🛠️ THE WAR STORIES (because we test EVERYTHING 😅):
🔹 Google Business kept rejecting my posts with zero docs. So I introspected Buffer's GraphQL schema LIVE, found it needs a hidden "post type" + a details object, reverse-engineered it, and validated it against their real API WITHOUT spamming (create a future-scheduled post → confirm accepted → delete). Shipped.
🔹 I "fixed" the Instagram link by making a code node fetch the permalink — which HUNG the n8n task runner for 60 seconds and silently aborted my TikTok + LinkedIn posts. Caught it in a real test, ripped it out, moved link-fetching to a clean background cron. Lesson burned in: NO network calls inside engine code nodes.
🔜 THE NEXT MOUNTAIN: my underwater results still aren't quite as good as the Dive+ app (warmer, more natural). So I'm going to reverse-engineer Dive+ — learn its exact color transform from before/after image pairs, bake it into a LUT, and match it (or beat it). One tap → Dive+ quality, on autopilot, across 9 platforms.
From a "video distributor" to a branded, multilingual, color-grading, underwater-correcting, 9-platform publishing studio. Self-hosted on n8n. It is EATING. 🔥🤿