Instagram Likes
I recently had reason to want to look up some of my past likes on my Instagram account. Turns out, it’s not that easy.
With Instagram’s rebranding earlier this year, they also took the opportunity to disable several handy features in their API, one of them being the ability to export IG posts you like to a different platform. Previously, all you had to do was hook up an IFTTT (if-this-then-that) account to your Instagram and, say, Evernote, to have all your likes automagically saved to your Evernote. Now, no more.
I can sort of see the thinking behind that - if I like someone else’s post, I don’t own that image so I don’t necessarily have the rights to “download” it. However, there are legitimate use cases for this including if I wanted an automated way to bookmark these images for later reference.
The method I’ve outlined below is still not fully automated, but it is better than individually bookmarking each liked post.
The ingredients
- An Instagram account, of course
- A Twitter account you’ve created just for this purpose (don’t use your main one!)
- An IFTTT account
The process
- After you have your Instagram and Twitter accounts in place, login to your IFTTT account
- Set up a recipe to post from Twitter to Instagram, like so. The tweet that you post from instagram will actually just have the IG username and a permalink to the specific instagram post. But, Pinterest is smart enough to pull the only available image from that page although it links to the twitter post (which is not great, but not bad either).
What your IFTTT recipe summary looks like:
What the ‘action’ part of your IFTTT recipe summary looks like:
- Find your past Instagram likes via the Settings menu on your iPhone or iPad Instagram app. I’m not sure where the menu option is on Android.
- Forward the Instagram posts individually and tweet them to the Twitter account you’ve created for this purpose.
- That’s it! IFTTT works its magic, and posts the photos to your Pinterest page and now you can refer to a selection of your Instagram likes.
Obviously, this is not a fully automated process and cannot be used to get a full backup of your Instagram likes, but this will help you catalog specific IG posts for future reference.
Feel free to comment below if you’ve found a better or different method to do the same thing.
Arti Annaswamy
Data analytics, process improvement, project management, coffee drinking