Instagram

(minipost) Instagram: comments from your private account are public

Jo Brodie Instagram, notTwitter , , , , ,

Having a private Instagram account means that if someone visits your profile they won’t see any of your photos.

However if you comment on anyone’s photos / reels etc your avatar, like and comment are public. I think your likes are public too but I’ve not tested it.

I’m not sure how aware people are of this fact though I suspect they may work it out on a case by case basis. If I hover over the account in green below it tells me that their account is private but I can see their avatar, comment and how many posts they’ve made and how many followers / following.

An Instagram comment from a private account is visible publicly.

It doesn’t seem to be possible to send Tweets-with-images to Instagram (easy in reverse)? Can it be done?

Jo Brodie Third party services, Twitter, Twitter - advanced , , , , , ,

Is it possible to post a Tweet and have it appear automatically on Instagram and have the tweeted image show up in Instagram too?1 If so, how?

A friend wanted to know if it’s possible / straightforward to post a Tweet (that contains an image) and have it appear on Instagram (with image showing). I spent some time trying to set it up for her and not succeeding. After reasonably extensive searching on Google, forums, Quora, IFTTT (for a ready-made recipe) and looking at blog posts highlighting potential workarounds etc we drew a blank and it seems that it’s not a straightforward thing. We’re not technical enough to faff about with Twitter’s API. We also assume we can’t be the first people to have tried this.

Instagram to Twitter
It is easy to do the reverse (Instagram to Twitter) but you need a third party intermediate, like IFTTT (If This Then That), for an image to show up in the tweet itself because Twitter doesn’t naturally show Instagram pictures as pictures2 just as links.

A tweeted picture of beautiful pink tulips posted via Instagram linked to Twitter via IFTTT

Above: this is a screenshot of the tweet linked below (in case it renders incorrectly on any given browser). It shows a picture appearing in the tweet and a link to view the pic on Instagram.

I’d assumed it would be straightforward to reverse the IFTTT ‘recipe’ so that a posted tweet could be reposted at Instagram (but only where a particular hashtag was used, to prevent all my friend’s tweets appearing as Instaposts!).

The reason she wanted to do it from Instagram to Twitter is in part because she prefers to use a laptop and you cant upload an image to Instagram from a laptop (also it’s easier to type the accompanying text with a keyboard). Also Insta to Twitter via IFTTT truncates part of the message if too long.

I use IFTTT as the intermediary between Twitter and Instagram so that every photo I post to Instagram is automatically tweeted out and, importantly, shows up as an image and not just as a link. Without using IFTTT you can connect Twitter to Instagram (eg directly from your phone’s settings) and the same will happen, but no photo will appear.

Footnotes

1 I think this wouldn’t be possible if the tweet contained a link because links in Twitter only show up as an image if the Twitter Card has been set up (you can check any link with Twitter’s Card Validator). Instagram is a different platform and doesn’t support Twitter cards anyway (see [2]).

2 “Last week [written in 2012], Facebook-owned Instagram decided to turn off support for Twitter Card functionality for its photos. Basically, you would no longer see the full images; rather, you’d see a cropped version.” TechCrunch). Without a third party app you just see a link to view the post on Instagram, with the app you see a picture in the tweet.

How to display Instagram pictures correctly in tweets using IFTTT

Jo Brodie howto, Third party services, Twitter, Twitter - advanced , ,

If you post to Instagram and it sends a copy to Twitter then only a link appears, Twitter doesn’t display your image in the tweet. The reason is because Instagram does not support ‘Twitter cards’(1) but you can(2) bypass this by using the third party service IFTTT (If This, Then That) to get around it and display images correctly. Once you upload a new image to Instagram it will get tweeted out and display as a picture (note that it won’t work in cases where you write a tweet and include an Instagram link).

Be aware that if you have ‘post to Twitter’ switched on on your Instagram account then you may end up with two copies of the tweet – one directly from Instagram with no image (the wrong one), and the one via IFTTT with the image (the new and improved version). You can safely switch off the Instagram one (see my image below of my settings).

You will need, and to be logged into

  • a Twitter account
  • an Instagram account
  • an IFTTT account

Once logged into IFTTT visit this recipe(3) page Tweet your Instagrams as native photos and follow the instructions to ‘connect’ your Twitter (https://ifttt.com/twitter) and Instagram (https://ifttt.com/instagram) accounts – IFTTT refers to these as ‘channels’.

ifttttwitter

This will allow your Twitter and Instagram accounts can talk to each other independently, through IFTTT.

Once done it should look a bit like this and when you post an image to Instagram and it should turn up on your Twitter timeline with the picture appearing.

0000ifftttwitterinsta

It worked… [if you’re viewing on a mobile it will probably look as if it didn’t, but it did!]

Note that these are my settings on Instagram – it says that I have Twitter-sharing switched off, which is true, but the IFTTT recipe is now overriding this.

photo.PNG

(1)Twitter cards are basically a display-format that websites can sign up to so that pictures embed and display on Twitter as an image rather than as a link that you have to click on. The IFTTT system uploads the image to Twitter as a (usually hidden, but may show on mobile apps as a pic.twitter link and also provides a link back to the original Instagram (that link will show as iff.tt).

(2)However you might prefer that people click on the link so that your Instagram account gets the relevant metrics and you might also prefer that Twitter isn’t further overrun with images 🙂

(3)There are other examples of recipes that will also perform this function, have a search of the options and see what’s on there.

Instagram pictures don’t show on Twitter (don’t autopreview) – no idea why

Jo Brodie Third party services , , ,

Update 23 October 2016: There’s a pretty easy to implement workaround using IFTTT. Full instructions here: How to display Instagram pictures correctly in tweets using IFTTT.

Update 26 April 2016: Thanks to @thameswatch who pointed me to a December 2012 (!) article explaining that Instagram pics haven’t been shown in-tweet since then, and explains the reasons behind it.

 

If you share a picture on Twitter from Instagram… it doesn’t show up as a picture on Twitter. I’ve no idea why that should be.

You need to click the link to go to the Instagram website to see the picture there and not as an autopreview on Twitter. I find this reasonably odd as I thought Twitter and Instagram were best buds but perhaps not. I’m fairly sure Flickr images autopreview, as do animated gifs, Vines etc (remember you can switch off autoplay) and YouTube videos.

You can see this in action by looking at the @Instagram feed which includes links to Insta images, none of which show up (other images on their feed do show up but these were uploaded directly to Twitter and are pic.twitter or other autopreviewing services).

Screen Shot 2016-04-11 at 22.02.32

All the instagram.com/ links are pictures but they don’t show up as such (I’ve tried on desktop browser Twitter, Twitter for iPhone, Echofon for iPhone and Janetter).

By contrast here’s a Vine, showing up perfectly well

Screen Shot 2016-04-11 at 22.13.33.png

Here’s a tweet I sent with a picture that I uploaded to Twitter via my phone, it shows up fine (because I’d not used Instagram, though I did add it to my Insta account).

Anyone know why? Seems a bit of a mystery.