Popular automation service IFTTT (If This Then That) recently launched its iOS app, letting you tap into “native” channels like contacts and photos, and creating automation recipes around these channels.

The IFTTT app adds 3 new native channels — contacts, reminders and photos. If you’re not familiar with IFTTT, the service does an action you specify each time a trigger is fired. The trigger could be anything like a new item in an RSS feed, or in the case of iOS, a new photo added to the Camera Roll etc. The action is a response to the trigger or the change, like uploading that photo to Dropbox, or mailing it to your email address.

Below we list some of the best recipes you can create using IFTTT’s native iOS channels.

Keep a backup of your contact list in a Google docs spreadsheet.

It’s always good to have redundant backups of important data, so even if you might have a copy of your contacts in iCloud and Google, it’s helpful to have it in the form of an easily sortable spreadsheet. https://ifttt.com/recipes/102384

Add an entry in your calendar when you add a new contact

There are times when you add a person to your contacts but need access to additional metadata to remember that person later on. This recipe does exactly that, adding the person’s name, position, company and of course phone number to your Google Calendar, so you can remember when you met that person.  https://ifttt.com/recipes/87519

There’s also a similar recipe to mail you every time you add a new contact. https://ifttt.com/recipes/90301

Upload certain type of photos to online storage services

Dropbox’s iOS app has a handy auto upload option, but it doesn’t let you filter which photos you want to upload to Dropbox. Using IFTTT, you can filters like, photos that are screenshots, photos in a certain album, photos from the front facing camera and so on, to selectively upload photos to Dropbox.

A very useful recipe to share certain photos with your friends or relatives would be to simply put it in a specific album (which can be different for each person), and tell IFTTT to send a mail to the person whenever a new photo is added. https://ifttt.com/recipes/103681

• Screenshots -> Dropbox
• Any photo -> Dropbox
• Photo with front camera -> Dropbox
• Photo with rear camera -> Dropbox
• Photo from album -> Dropbox

You can of course choose alternate storage services like Flickr, Google Drive, Skydrive or Box.

Use Siri to add notes to Evernote

Siri can add reminders to specific lists, so you can use this feature to dictate “notes” which can be added to an Evernote list, which can then be picked up by the IFTTT app and added to Evernote. https://ifttt.com/recipes/103374

Backup reminders to Google Calendar, Any.do

While reminders sync via iCloud, you might want your reminder list to be present on other services like Google Calendar and Any.do.

If you like to keep a track of completed tasks, you can log them in Evernote, a Google Docs spreadsheet or simply via SMS.

We hope these recipes would help you automate tasks that you earlier had to manually do. If you have a recipe you like, and don’t see mentioned above, please tell us in the comments below.