My sports team needs me to upload pictures to Instagram for accountability, motivation for team mates, marketing, etc. I don't wish to have the app installed on my phone, and end-up spending time endlessly scrolling my feed. Instagram doesn't allow uploading pictures from their web site on a Desktop.

I tried using the Desktop browser with mobile emulation (or a mobile User Agent), but the upload experience was pretty bad - you can't pre-process images before uploading them if you don't have a touch screen.

igzen lets me pre-process the image using a Python+Tkinter based viewer, and then uses selenium to post the images.

# Set INSTAGRAM_USERNAME, INSTAGRAM_PASSWORD environment variables
$ export INSTAGRAM_USERNAME="foobar"
$ export INSTAGRAM_PASSWORD="passwordyo!"

# Install the requirements
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run the main script
$ python main.py --crop <path-to-image> "caption with #hashtags"

In the image viewer/cropper, you can click anywhere and draw a square to crop the image. Hit SPACE to actually save the current crop to disk. Hit q to close the image editor, and your browser should automatically open up.

You could pass the --share argument to completely automate the process, and not requiring to even click the share button at the end. If it makes you anxious to post without any manual checks, don't use this flag.

NOTE: The tool uses pyautogui to select the image to upload, after signing into Instagram. You need to make sure that the browser window opened by the tool is the focused window, for everything to work as expected!

Happy Instagramming!

IGZen stands for Instagram Zen. Zen could be a reference to the simplicity of the tool. It could also refer to the fact that this tool lets you post stuff to Instagram, without getting sucked into the timeline and letting it eat away into your focus time.

This tool is licensed under GPLv3