Instagram: Share photo from webpage

Question

In my shopping site I had implemented the functionality for 'Login via Instagram' and found it is working well. Now is it possible to share a product image and its description to the user Instagram account or whether Instagram provides any javascript methods just like facebook, twitter, google+ etc.

Answer 1

The short answer is: No. The only way to post images is through the mobile app.

From the Instagram API documentation: http://instagram.com/developer/endpoints/media/

At this time, uploading via the API is not possible. We made a conscious choice not to add this for the following reasons:

• Instagram is about your life on the go – we hope to encourage photos from within the app. However, in the future we may give whitelist access to individual apps on a case by case basis.
• We want to fight spam & low quality photos. Once we allow uploading from other sources, it's harder to control what comes into the Instagram ecosystem.

All this being said, we're working on ways to ensure users have a consistent and high-quality experience on our platform.

Answer 2

Uploading on Instagram is possible. Their API provides a media upload endpoint, even if it's not documented.

POST https://instagram.com/api/v1/media/upload/

Check this code for example https://code.google.com/p/twitubas/source/browse/common/instagram.php

Answer 3

Updated June 2020

It is no longer possible... allegedly. If you have a Facebook or Instagram dedicated contact (because you work in either a big agency or with a big client) it may potentially be possible depending on your use case, but it's highly discouraged.

---

Before December 2019:

It is now "possible":

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/content-publishing

The Content Publishing API is a subset of Instagram Graph API endpoints that allow you to publish media objects. Publishing media objects with this API is a two step process — you first create a media object container, then publish the container on your Business Account.

Its worth noting that "The Content Publishing API is in closed beta with Facebook Marketing Partners and Instagram Partners only. We are not accepting new applicants at this time." from https://stackoverflow.com/a/49677468/445887

Answer 4

Instagram recently released an update to their native share functionality. It is available via a mobile browser only using navigator.share, MDN reference here.

The recommended implementation is to check for navigator.canShare and then use share to native share url, text, or files. For Instagram, the files will be most useful, as you can see in the example below you can share an image from the web. Here is example code to accomplish this.

  const shareImageAsset = async (): Promise<boolean> => {
    const filesArray = [
      new File([blobImageAsset], `${title}.png`, {
        type: 'image/png',
        lastModified: new Date().getTime(),
      }),
    ];
    const shareData = {
      title: `${title}`,
      files: filesArray,
    };

    if (navigator.canShare && navigator.canShare(shareData)) {
      await navigator.share(shareData);
    }
  };

Note: the blogImageAsset was originally a png image fetched from a remote url and converted to a blob like this:

  const response = await fetch(url.toString());
  const blob = await response.blob();

It's important to keep the title, File type, and original image type aligned or this will fail.

It ends up looking like this:

Answer 5

As of November 17, 2015. This rule has officially changed. Instagram has deprecated the rule against using their API to upload images.

Good luck.