n8n Automation: Turn Google Drive Photos into Short Videos

Turn New Google Drive Photos into 6-Second Short Videos—Automatically

This n8n workflow automatically finds a fresh photo in your Google Drive “To animate” folder every two hours, generates a motion plan and platform-specific captions with Google Gemini, animates it into a 6-second MiniMax Hailuo clip, and publishes it to TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts via PostWire—while logging results to Google Sheets and sending Gmail alerts on failures.

What this workflow does

• Runs on a schedule: Executes every two hours to look for new images.
• Filters and selects content: Searches the specified Google Drive folder for image files, skipping HEIC/HEIF and GIF formats.
• Avoids reprocessing: Picks one photo to process and moves it to an “Animated” Google Drive folder.
• Generates motion + captions: Downloads the photo and sends it to Google Gemini to generate a motion prompt plus captions tailored for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube (including a YouTube Shorts title).
• Creates the video: Sends the image and Gemini plan to MiniMax Hailuo to render a 6-second image-to-video clip.
• Publishes everywhere: Uses PostWire to publish to TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts with the appropriate captions.
• Tracks outcomes in Google Sheets: Appends a “posted” row only when all platforms succeed.
• Handles errors with visibility: If rendering or posting fails for any platform, it writes “needs fix/partly posted” details to Google Sheets and emails failure information via Gmail.

Use cases

• Content teams turning new photo uploads into consistent multi-platform short-form posts.
• SaaS operators using n8n to automate social publishing from a managed asset library.
• Automation engineers building a reliable pipeline with Drive → Gemini → Hailuo → PostWire → Sheets.

Technical details

• n8n schedule (runs every two hours)
• Google Drive (source “To animate” folder, destination “Animated” folder)
• Google Gemini (motion prompt + TikTok/Instagram/YouTube captions, YouTube Shorts title)
• MiniMax Hailuo (6-second image-to-video rendering)
• PostWire (publishes to TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts)
• Google Sheets (status logging: posted / needs fix / partly posted)
• Gmail (alerts with failure details)
• Workflow logic uses nodes such as if, set, gmail, limit, merge, and filter