Instagram Import

I joined Instagram in 2011 a few months after it launched and a year before it was taken over by Facebook. I thought it was a fun way to share photos with family and anyone else who was interested. It’s gradually held less and less theoretical appeal to me over the years as it’s diluted what I see whilst somehow managing to keep clawing away at my attention. When I browse it now I barely see any posts from family or friends because they aren’t posting there either. I see tons of text where I wanted to see photos. About the only thing that distinguishes it from any other social platform is that I still seem to somehow find it engaging. And that annoys me and at some point I know I’m going to flip out with it.

I last posted on Instagram 18 months ago, and shortly after that decided I was probably done with the platform and downloaded my archive from them. I’ve finally got around to sorting out that archive and decided I wanted to keep the pictures up but I’d rather have them where I control them. So they are now (almost) all here as Photo Posts: instagram. It’s been an interesting exercise going through all the posts to import them here.

I imported all my photos in a very old fashioned manner. Instagram’s archive contained an HTML page linking to all my photos, I loaded that into an editor and did lots of search/replace on it until I’d removed most of the cruft. Then I split the file into hundreds of small ones (using csplit which annoyingly caps out at 99 splits), and wrote a shell script to jiggle each file around. My script put the date and image links in the format I chose; I remembered how to use sed; I remembered how annoying regex’s are in bash. I went through each of the 651 files by hand to give them filenames and titles.

Mostly though I enjoyed pulling up each of those posts and remembering details of the last fifteen years. The early posts were just one photo, one post. Later Instagram let you add more pictures to each post. I watched my own style change as I went back through the years. I learnt stuff about myself, remembered things I’d forgotten had happened, found recurring themes through the years. I’m sure I could have got [insert AI chatbot of choice here] to sort my files out faster, perhaps better, but, to me, enjoying the process is a lot of the point of the exercise.

The header photo is from Green, a set of photos taken on a sunny July day just about three years ago. I knew I was leaving Yorkshire at that point. I’d spent twenty years walking paths and by-ways around the same area and I was still finding new places to go. I’m not sorry that we’ve moved on, but I do miss it. But enjoying the process of life is a lot of the point of the exercise.