insta-tweet 2.0.0b13

Automatically Repost Content From Instagram to Twitter

InstaTweet v2.0.0-beta

Automatically Repost Content From Instagram to Twitter

Ever tried sharing an Instagram post to Twitter, only to find out that all you tweeted was a link, and not the actual photo/video?

Humiliating. That could be literally anything. Nobody will click it.

InstaTweet shares the actual content of the post. Not just a link to it.

With InstaTweet, you can rest easy knowing that, although nobody will click the link, they'll at least see what you posted.

What's InstaTweet?

InstaTweet is a tool that automates the process of reposting content from Instagram to Twitter. After adding a list of Instagram usernames, InstaTweet will periodically scrape their profiles and check for new posts. If any new content is found, it will be automatically downloaded, cropped, and tweeted. Save InstaTweet profiles to quickly switch between Twitter accounts, Instagram sessions, user lists and hashtag lists.

Once you've configured a profile, using InstaTweet is as simple as:

from InstaTweet import InstaTweet

it = InstaTweet.load('My Profile')
it.start()

You can also run it as a loop for a single profile:

it.loop(delay=120)

Or you can loop through multiple profiles:

profiles = ['profile1', 'profile2', 'profile3']

for profile in profiles:
    it = InstaTweet.load(profile)
    it.start()

Why?

InstaTweet has two main use cases:

1. To automatically share your own Instagram posts to Twitter
2. To automatically tweet new content from other Instagram users

Regardless of your intention, InstaTweet will detect new posts from the users you specify, download them, and repost them to Twitter.

Installation

To clone and install this repository with pip:

python -m pip install git+https://github.com/TDKorn/insta-tweet

Getting Started

InstaTweet uses profiles to help manage Twitter accounts, Instagram sessions, and userlists.

To configure a profile, you'll need to have the following:

• session_id – Instagram sessionid cookie. You can get one by logging into Instagram on a desktop browser
• twitter_keys – Twitter API keys with v1.1 access
• profile_name – Self explanatory
• user_agent – Optional

As tweets are sent, each profile will update its user_map – a mapping of Instagram usernames to their associated:

• Hashtag lists (for use when composing tweets)
• Scraped post history
• Sent tweets history

Profiles can be saved and reused as templates. Simply load a profile, save it under a new name, and make any changes you'd like. See the Examples folder for more information.

Creating a Template Profile

Let's create a template profile containing only the session_id and twitter_keys, as they rarely need to be updated:

from InstaTweet import InstaTweet
import json

session_id = 'sessionid'
twitter_keys = {
    'Consumer Key': 'key',
    'Consumer Secret': 'secret',
    'Access Token': 'token',
    'Token Secret': 'secret'
}

it = InstaTweet(session_id=session_id, twitter_keys=twitter_keys)
it.save_profile('My Template')

print('Profile Settings:', json.dumps(it.config, indent=4), sep='\n')

Output:

Using default profile.
Saved profile "My Template"
Profile Settings:
{
    "session_id": "sessionid",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.110 Safari/537.36",
    "twitter_keys": {
        "Consumer Key": "key",
        "Consumer Secret": "secret",
        "Access Token": "token",
        "Token Secret": "secret"
    },
    "user_map": {}
}

Using a Template Profile

Now that we've got our template profile saved, we need to add some users to scrape. For this example, I've created a Twitter account with the username @td_korn, and it'll be a fan account for both TD Bank and the band Korn.

Let's load our template profile and save it under a new name, so that we don't overwrite the template with our changes.

from InstaTweet import InstaTweet

it = InstaTweet.load('My Template')
it.save_profile('tdkorn')

Output:

Loaded profile "My Template"
Saved profile "tdkorn"

Adding Instagram Users to Monitor

We'll add TD Bank and Korn's Instagram accounts to the user_map using the add_users() method.

users = ['td_canada', 'korn_official']
it.add_users(users)

By default, newly added Instagram users will only have their posts scraped (and not tweeted) the first time InstaTweet runs, and tweets will be sent for any new posts going forward.

I actually want to tweet all of Korn's recent posts right away, so I'll specify scrape_only=False and add the users as follows:

it.add_users('td_canada')
it.add_users('korn_official', scrape_only=False)

Adding Tweet Hashtags

At this point, our user map looks like this:

{
    "td_canada": {
        "hashtags": [],
        "scraped": [],
        "tweets": []
    },
    "korn_official": {
        "hashtags": [],
        "scraped": [
            "-1"    # Will trigger tweets to be sent
        ],
        "tweets": []
    }
}

The only thing left to do is configure the "hashtags" lists. Here, you can specify hashtags to include in tweets when reposting from this user.

Let's add some general hashtags for all users, as well as some user-specific ones.

hashtags = ['TDKorn', 'TD', 'Korn']
for user in it.user_map:
        it.add_hashtags(user, hashtags)

it.add_hashtags('td_canada', ['finance', 'banking', 'corporate'])
it.add_hashtags('korn_official', ['KornBand', 'metal'])

print('User Map:', json.dumps(it.user_map, indent=4), sep='\n')

Output:

User Map:
{
    "td_canada": {
        "hashtags": [
            "TDKorn",
            "TD",
            "Korn",
            "finance",
            "banking",
            "corporate"
        ],
        "scraped": [],
        "tweets": []
    },
    "korn_official": {
        "hashtags": [
            "TDKorn",
            "TD",
            "Korn",
            "KornBand",
            "metal"
        ],
        "scraped": [],
        "tweets": []
    }
}

Running InstaTweet Locally

Once you're satisfied with your profile, all that's left to do is run InstaTweet! You can either run it once:

from InstaTweet import InstaTweet

it = InstaTweet.load('tdkorn')
it.start()

Or as a loop that checks for new posts every delay seconds:

it.loop(delay=120)

As tweets are sent, InstaTweet output its progress to console:

Checking posts for @td_canada
Initialized User: @td_canada
No new posts to tweet for @td_canada
Checking posts for @korn_official
There are 12 posts to tweet for @korn_official
Downloaded post 2798299617079656141 by korn_official from https://www.instagram.com/p/CbVjqz7JP7N
Twitter media upload for post 2798299617079656141 complete
Tweet sent for post 2798299617079656141
Downloaded post 2799071405942316506 by korn_official from https://www.instagram.com/p/CbYTJ0UJR3a
Twitter media upload for post 2799071405942316506 complete
Tweet sent for post 2799071405942316506
...
Downloaded post 2806287860374146245 by korn_official from https://www.instagram.com/p/Cbx7_DPF4zF
Cropping video 2806287860374146245  # Videos are cropped to remove black bars
Twitter media upload for post 2806287860374146245 complete
Tweet sent for post 2806287860374146245
...
Downloaded post 2813912397753806586 by korn_official from https://www.instagram.com/p/CcNBmrBLu76
Twitter media upload for post 2813912397753806586 complete
Tweet sent for post 2813912397753806586
Finished insta-tweeting for @korn_official
All users have been insta-tweeted
Saved profile "tdkorn"

Note that InstaTweet continuously updates your profile while running, but only the final save will have an alert printed.

Running InstaTweet on a Server

Coming soon!