Instagram today launched a new feature that lets users embed photos and videos right onto a webpage without needing to use a third-party service. While a boon for the Web, it’s not available for mobile usage.
If there’s something you want to post from Instagram to your blog or website, just tap on the share button to the right side of the photo or video and you’ll be displayed a block of text, similar to a YouTube HTML embed code. Copy and paste it onto any page and there it will appear.
Some people are able to access this embed feature now, but it appears Instagram is still rolling out the feature now. It’s important to note that only those photos and videos that you have marked public can be embedded.
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Content that is embedded onto websites will have Instagram branding on it, along with the creator’s username, the number of Likes and comments it has received. Right now, the default size of the images appears to be 640 pixels by 640 pixels, but if you’re a handy wizard at HTML, you could always tweak the embed code to get the image to the size you need.
Instagram says that the embed feature has been one of the most requested features and it’s somewhat strange that it took them this long to add it. Twitter and Vine both make it so that their media can be embedded easily. In fact, at a recent event, I asked a friend why they were capturing video on Vine instead of Instagram since they would get 9 more seconds of footage. His reply was that you couldn’t embed the recording on Instagram.
The news comes less than a month from when video support was introduced. Certainly photo and video sharing has picked up over the past few weeks — there are more than 16 billion photos shared already on the photo social network, with 130 million people using the service every month.
Until today, users had to rely on third-party services like Embed Instagram and Storify, which was one of the first services to import Instagram content into its feed.
Photo credit: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images
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