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Works with Instagram

Let creators connect their Instagram professional account in one click, then rank their posts by likes and comments, build galleries from them, and post a photo when they say so.

What you can build

Apps for people who share their work on Instagram: a leaderboard of their posts by likes and comments, a portfolio gallery that stays current on its own, a mood board built from their own feed, a planner that posts the finished photo. Every visitor connects their own Instagram account, so one app serves every creator who opens it.

How it connects

A connection to the visitor's own professional account. Your app declares Instagram in backend.js with one sentence saying why, shows a Connect button, and the platform runs the consent card and the sign-in through Instagram Login — the visitor signs in with Instagram itself, no Facebook page needed. The platform holds and refreshes the credential; your app has no key and no token in its code, and your backend reads through the @vibes.diy/social library as the visitor.

What it can read and do

Scope Your app can
instagram_business_basic Read the visitor's username and their own posts, newest first, with caption, type, link, time, and like and comment counts
instagram_business_content_publish Post a photo with a caption to the visitor's Instagram

Posting is its own scope, shown on the consent card as its own line, and the visitor decides.

Starter prompts

  • Make a page that ranks my Instagram posts by likes and comments so I can see what people love most.
  • Build a portfolio page for my art that shows my latest Instagram posts as a gallery, with likes and comments on each.
  • Make a mood board that pulls in my recent Instagram posts and lets me sort them into collections.

Good to know

Instagram connects professional accounts — Creator or Business. That is the account type Instagram opens to apps: Meta retired the personal-account API (Basic Display) on December 4, 2024, so every app, ours included, reads a professional account. Switching is free and takes about a minute:

  1. In the Instagram app, open your profile and tap the menu.
  2. Go to Settings → Account type and tools → Switch to professional account.
  3. Pick Creator (or Business) and a category.

You keep your handle, your followers and every post, and you can switch back whenever you like. A professional account is a public account, so a private account becomes public when it switches — worth a moment's thought before you connect.

  • Likes and comments are the numbers to build on. Views and plays live behind an insights permission apps don't declare yet. A post with likes hidden reads as hidden, never as zero.
  • A post is a photo. Instagram posts always carry an image, from a public link Instagram fetches itself, plus an optional caption.

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