Copying photos to Micro.blog from Instagram

[manton]

The iOS app for Micro.blog is a great way to post photos to a hosted microblog. It includes photo cropping and filters, and you can publish short text posts as well as photos within the same app. We think the best experience for most blogs will be to post your photos directly with the Micro.blog app.

If you enable Twitter cross-posting, your photos from a microblog will also be sent to Twitter as native tweets with an embedded photo. Because of limits in Instagram’s API, however, you can’t cross-post from a blog to your Instagram account.

The service OwnYourGram can take your Instagram photos and automatically post them to a Micro.blog-hosted blog. OwnYourGram uses the Micropub API to upload photos to your microblog. Here are the steps to enable it:

1. In Micro.blog on the web, go to Account → Edit Apps. Scroll down to “Instagram” and enter your Instagram username, then click Update.
2. In Instagram itself, make sure to include the URL for your Micro.blog-hosted blog, such as http://your-username.micro.blog/. OwnYourGram will use this to verify that your microblog and Instagram account are owned by the same person.
3. In OwnYourGram, enter your microblog URL when signing up. OwnYourGram will walk you through setting up your account and publishing your first photo from Instagram.

While using OwnYourGram, you can still post photos and microblog posts separately to Micro.blog whenever you’d like to using the Micro.blog app. To disable OwnYourGram’s automatic posting, click the “Disconnect Instagram” button in the OwnYourGram dashboard.

[warner]

Probably should delete this post, OwnYourGram is now practically defunct: "We’re experiencing trouble with Instagram blocking requests from this website. New accounts are disabled, and you will experience long delays importing photos on existing accounts. "

[khurtwilliams]

Have you tried https://carlrustung.no/blog/insta-zapier-howto/?

[warner]

@khurtwilliams

https://carlrustung.no/blog/insta-zapier-howto/

He says

This post is old

This post is more than a year old, and I’m not using Zapier anymore myself. Things might have changed since I wrote this!

So no I haven’t braved it.
Even if it works now, I have so little faith in IG keeping anything open web stable, I just don’t post anything solely on IG (except when I SpitFire_Bars for funsies)

[warner]

this

Import from Instagram

Here’s a beta release of Micro.blog for macOS with the change to work with Instagram’s new JSON export file format. It only works with photos, not videos yet. https://s3.amazonaws.com/micro.blog/mac/Micro.blog_2.0.4b1.zip

looks like a promising one-off transfer solution on the way though.

Might do yearly archiving of mine, as I usually delete IG posts after 2 years up there.

[khurtwilliams]

Understand about IG. The technique still works and I adapted it for Untappd. I use IG regularly. The local nano craft brewery uses IG to announce their new releases. If I’m not on IG, I’ll miss the release announcement and the beer.

https://www.instagram.com/p/COiwL1VJsmA/

[warner]

do you have examples of it working to Micro.blog?
I’ve reached my 5 zap free limit and only wanna shove out another if it’s proper good & reliable.

[khurtwilliams]

Sure: Khürt Williams - Beer

[warner]

I see. But these are drawn from Untappd as source right?
Any evidence that IG source functions properly?
I was blocked on IG briefly for using a PhantomBuster follower that did anything more than 1 every 4 hours.

[khurtwilliams]

Sorry. I misunderstood that ask. IG example is here: Khürt Williams -

[warner]

Works on Brave, but is blocked on my Facebook-blocking Firefox, implying there is some sense in which its retained Facebook’s touch, rather than indepedently owned image data:

[khurtwilliams]

Interesting. It’s not your browser. Instagram (aka Facebook) is blocking the image from loading on micro.blog.

I’ll have to find a way to upload the image instead of linking.

[warner]

Would be a better more sustainable solution anway. Could you automate uploading it to M.b?

[khurtwilliams]

I’m still looking into this.

[warner]

Amazing dude: lmk!

Their new html exports are actually surprisingly decent, and certainly heaps better than TikTok’s JSON ones. I’m experimenting next week with publishing non-private parts using GitHub Pages as an alternative approach.

[khurtwilliams]

@warner

I’m sure I don’t understand what this means below.

@manton

To upload a photo to a Micro.blog-hosted blog, first query Micropub to get the media endpoint:

GET /micropub?q=config
Authorization: Bearer 123456789

This will return a response like:

{
  "media-endpoint": "https://micro.blog/micropub/media"
}

The media endpoint accepts a multipart/form-data upload with a file part containing the JPEG image data. Micro.blog will send back an HTTP 202 response while the image is being copied to the published site. It may take a few seconds for it to be available at the URL in the response:

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Location: https://username.micro.blog/uploads/123.jpg

I need some help with the media upload part. I’m not sure I understand the parameters that get sent to the media upload endpoint.

In Zapier I sent a GET request and received a response with a number of parameters.

The question is what should be in the POST request to upload a file.

[sod]

I have a Zapier account, but unfortunately don’t have access to the premium features, like Webhooks. So I can’t verify this myself, but I think you should do the following:

1. Remove access_token from the Data.
2. Below Headers, add Authorization with the value Bearer 1234...].

Replace 123... above with your unique access token. That should do it, at least for authorization.

I’m unsure about the file part below Data. That part belongs there, but its value should be an actual image (image data). From your screenshot, it looks like it’s just an URL to an image (not the image itself).

Maybe Zapier is smart enough to handle that for you. You’ll have to test the zap and see what happens.

[khurtwilliams]

Thank you. I don’t think authorisation is an issue. It’s something else’s. I can query the micro.blog endpoint. I just don’t know what to send to upload a photo micro.blog.

[sod]

There are two issues with the current zap: the authorization token is sent as multipart form data, and no image is provided (just an URL to an image). I’ve confirmed this with my Zapier account just now.

You have to follow my instructions above and add an additional action (Webhook GET request) to download the image before posting it to Micro.blog. Following below is a screenshot of a working zap.

Three things to take note of:

1. The second action in the zap downloads the actual photo from Instagram.
2. The downloaded file is then used in the third action (below the heading File).
3. Authorization is done below the heading Headers.

[khurtwilliams]

@sod

You have to follow my instructions above and add an additional action (Webhook GET request) to download the image before posting it to Micro.blog. Following below is a screenshot of a working zap.

Alread had that. Here is my existing Zap. It works perfectly to create a post on micro.blog with inline links to the Instagram image.

What I want to do instead, is

1. upload the Instagram image to micro.blog
2. then create a micro.blog post that includes the micro.blog version of the image.

So per @manton 's procedures I added at GET request to first query micro.blog’s micropub to get the media endpoint.

Now this is the part that I didn’t qutie understand.

The media endpoint accepts a multipart/form-data upload with a file part containing the JPEG image data.

I created a new Webhook POST to the media end point.

The last part was modifying my original POST webhook to insert the HTML for IMG tag.

It works.

See final result here:

https://khurt.blog/2022/01/08/december-hoppy-anniversary.html