While going through the process of moving away from social media and using my blog more, I realized there was a lot of me on Instagram that I wanted to make sure I archived. Specifically I’ve been really enjoying my “monthly memory” posts each month as sort of a visual “diary” of my month. And there are hundreds of posts about my vinyl collection and memories of my almost 13-year long relationship with Hannah. I didn’t want to just abandon those. So I’ve brought them over to my blog.
I used Instagram’s export feature to get the files. Then wrote a script to convert their weird export to something I could easily import, and back date, all of the posts. I had to first put everything in the same year/month/date folder structure I use for my photo blog and then convert the post to the right format so it would display here just like all the others. Even after extensive testing there was a bit of nerves running it on the live site as it ingested over 1,000 Instagram posts going back over a decade. But, it worked. And now my photo blog has all my history. I also grabbed all of my weekly wall “story” posts going back to when I started doing them from my new office. I will continue to cross post some stuff to Instagram, but, most of my writing/photos/status updates will be here, on my blog.