Posting Instagram Photos Automatically

Question

I'd like to post my Instagram photos to my WordPress blog.

I cannot use one of the many existing Instagram plugins, though, because those plugins simply post the images on my blog but they are still hosted by Instagram. I'd like this to be a batch process that will actually upload the Instagram photo to my WordPress media library and then post it.

In summary: How do I automatically upload and post Instagram photos to my WordPress blog (not via a sidebar widget)?

Answer 1

You'll probably have to do your own integration, but here's how I would approach it:

1. Grab an Instagram PHP wrapper: http://www.mauriciocuenca.com/blog/2011/02/instagram-api-implementation-in-php/ OR http://instaphp.com OR https://github.com/cosenary/Instagram-PHP-API
2. Authenticate via an admin option page
3. Iterate through your user images using the /users/self/feed method
4. Use the media_sideload_image() function found in wp-admin/includes/media.php to download the images
5. Keep a running cache of downloaded Instagram image IDs in an option to check before downloading an image.

If you want this to work as a WordPress gallery, you could assign a specific post ID to media_sideload_image and then include a gallery on that post.

It seems pretty straightforward. Check out the API documentation for self/feed: http://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/users/