Instagram import challenges

Hey all – I got excited when I read I could import my Instagram through the Mac app. Got all set up to go, went through the process and nothing happened.

Couple of points:

  1. My export was from 2020, so I’m not sure if something happened to the way things are exported since then that would stop it working.

  2. I’m using the M1 MacBook Pro, so not sure if that may have an impact or not.

It could just be user error - it quite often is with this stuff lol. But I’d appreciate any tips all the same :smiley:

Hi! :wave:

The changelog mentions a new file format back in May 2021 (version 2.0.4).

  • Updated photos import to support new export file format from Instagram.

That’s probably why it won’t work with your 2020 archive. You could try making a new export from Instagram or downloading an old version of Micro.blog for Mac: Micro.blog_2.0.3.zip.

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Yeah I wondered if that was it. The export was from just before I deleted my instagram account, so no option to grab a new one.

Oh well, not a big deal for me really.

Thanks for getting back to me!! Appreciate it!

You’re welcome. And to be clear: you probably can import your old archive as long as you use an older version of Micro.blog for Mac (before 2.0.4). See my previous response for a link to download version 2.0.3.

Stumbled across this browsing the search here. Wonder whether there’s any current state on importing Instagram archives (as of 2023) on systems other than Apple / MacOS? Thoughts, anyone?

I’m not aware of a good Instagram import solution except for Micro.blog for Mac. I’d love to add this to the web version of Micro.blog so that it’s available to more people, but we need to find a better way to handle uploading the very large Instagram archives.

Just out of curiosity: How do you handle that for Twitter, given these archives could be large too? (Maybe, taking Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, …, would it be possible too to have a somewhat “generic” import structure one could build scripts for, to convert offline archives into something easily digestable by micro.blog? Just an idea…)

Yep, for Twitter we have a special way to split the uploaded archive and reassemble it. We do this for Tumblr too, actually. We “just” need to apply the same mechanism for Instagram archives.

My gut feeling is that Instagram archives will be very large in some cases, much larger than tweet archives. So we need to go a little slowly.