For anyone wanting to escape the misery machine of Facebook and permanently delete their Instagram account, I’ve created a couple of shortcuts so you can migrate your photos to either a Micro.blog-hosted site or a site that runs on WordPress.
Both shortcuts use a copy of your Instagram archive to upload photos and create the appropriate posts. The date for each post is set to the original upload date. The post itself includes the original caption and, if available, location name. You can choose whether to remove hashtags or keep them in the post. The WordPress shortcut has an additional option to convert hashtags to regular tags instead.
I’ve added some safeguards to both shortcuts to prevent a migration from going awry and to give those with lots of photos the option to migrate incrementally rather than all at once.
- The shortcuts can be stopped and resumed without losing progress or duplicating what’s already been uploaded—especially useful if Shortcuts crashes for any reason. This is done by creating temporary files for each post and then deleting the file when the post has been created.
- It’s also possible to incrementally migrate photos so you don’t have to commit to doing them all at once. Both shortcuts migrate photos in batches, such as five photos at a time. You can specify how many photos to migrate per batch. When a batch is done, the shortcut needs to be run again to continue with a new batch.
Although I’ve tested both of these shortcuts with Micro.blog-hosted and WordPress-powered sites, I encourage anyone using them to start with some small batches first to make sure everything looks ok. Instagram captions can contain @mentions and hashtags anywhere so the lack of consistent formatting means everyone can write captions differently. If you’ve done anything special with how you’ve written them, you may need to make some adjustments.
