This is an application that sends select users Instagram posts to you as text messages (even if they are private). It's a way of receiving images/updates from family members without being on social media.
The reasoning for this project because is that I wanted to receive images (Instagram posts) from my family members but at the same time I'm not on social media. I wanted to have a way of "following" them but not being on Instagram.
Instagram To SMS checks for new Instagram posts from a list of people and when it finds new posts it sends the image and caption as a text message to my phone.
Interesting TED talk about quitting social media here.
This project relies on the intagram-scraper project by rarcega to download all the images from someone's Instagram profile and I use Twilio to send text messages.
I also used Flask and Ngrok to create a simple file server so that I could create a public URL for the downloaded images so that Twilio could send them.
- Update env variables
- Start up Image Server (export FLASK_APP=flaskImageServer.py and python -m flask run)
- Run setupImageServer.sh to set up ngrok (CRON this as urls expire)
- Run instagramToSMS.py script to check for images and send them (CRON)
You can run steps 3 and 4 in CRON everyday assuming the flask app is constantly running.