To get any useful information or indeed anything out of the Instagram web service you need the shortcode for the image (eg: BJKOF0KBnS4). Next up was to get the title and that meant getting it from Instagram. This all associated perfectly in Qlik Sense via the and was becoming a fun and fascinating way to explore and analyse my IGs. In addition I pulled out which of the major colour hues the dominant colour was in eg red, yellow, cyan, green, blue, magenta and then black, white and grey. Then I mapped those colours to the closest named colours on the CSS3 colour list, as the individual hex values are too unique for analysis. I used ColorThief for Python, I threw all 6500 images at it and created a couple more data tables mapping the dominant colour and a 4 colour palette for each image.
But what this meant was that I had the beginnings of a real data table:Īfter this first dabble with Python, I decided to use it to analyse the colour in the images. Unfortunately this is a little misleading as no timezone info so no clear way to offset the server timestamp to the local time it was taken (still investigating that). I managed to get a date for the image by extracting the creation date from the image with a simple Python script.
But what I really wanted was the meta data for each IG- at least when it taken and the title. Not much but a start, as it allows me to filter by who created the image. That gives you the image number and the user id. When you backup your images from Photodesk it stores them like so: 1317927813210600632_6614136.png which is the Instagram media_id. With a little more tinkering I could derive additional information from the IG filename. That gave me a way to list all the images and view them inside Qlik Sense. Which meant I simply needed to create a list of the files, and that’s as simple as Copy and Paste into a. So first off I needed to turn 6500 images into tabular data. For those who don’t know what Qlik Sense is, it’s a data analysis and visualisation tool, that can pretty much do anything with a little practice, patience and tinkering.īetween Kat and I we have approx 6500 (and counting) IGs. Now you can go the developer API route and build a custom application to do it but as I already had all the images backed up via a great 3rd party app ( Photodesk - also good for showing the details, comments etc), I decided to find a way I could use Qlik Sense to explore the images. Also most of the 3rd party tools to back up your IG account only grab the images and miss the titles and hashtags. But there’s no ‘back up’ or ‘download’ my data like say Twitter or even Flickr.
#Photodesk activity button Offline#
I wanted a way to explore at all my IGs, ideally offline on my machine so that it would act as a back up. You always end up needing a 3rd party app and the paging is annoying at best and at worst non existent. One of the things I hate about Instagram is that it’s really hard to search and browse your own images. Firstly a confession–I’m a fairly heavy Instagram user, and I take a lot of pictures of my dogs, food, flowers, sunsets and all the other trite things that ‘Instagrammers’ take pictures of.