I’ve been importing my Instagram posts for my @artlung account using IFTTT for 7 years with good results. But there was a set of several hundred posts from 2011 and 2012 that I never bothered with. To be honest looking back at the posts, and thinking of that time, those were the two years after my Mom died and blogging was not something I was emphasizing. Instagram was a nice bit of frippery I could do on the road.
Well, time has passed, Instagram was purchased by Facebook for a billion bucks, and I have a renewed interest on making sure my own content is controlled by me. That’s all about the #indieweb. And the end of 2019 and at the beginning of 2020 before all this Covid nonsense I participated with Gregor Love in some local San Diego #indiewebcamp get togethers which were really wonderful. It was a terrific reminder of how important it is to me to manage my own photos and drawings and writings.
Anyway, in my paltry seeking for a good solution for importing old Instagram posts into WordPress I didn’t find anything that fit the bill super well. I’ve been using Instalooter for ad hoc grabbing of photos and I like how well it has worked.
And so was born a bit of code I worked on this past weekend: InstalooterToWordPress, which is a PHP tool to turn instalooter dumps of images and JSON into WordPress XML importable files. It’s working great for me and for my usage. I hope to improve it and adapt it.
