Blog 

Although I'm making a post about it now, this was actually something I made last year,

I had this blog I made during my mad multimedia phase back in 2012, where I was just registering random domains, and making as many random meme accounts as I could on social media sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter,

One of those fun joke accounts, was a Tumblr blog called The Things I Eat, literally just Photographs of food that I have eaten. - I wasn't expecting this at first but it managed to obtain a decent following and also raised some interesting questions about my diet, it made good use of hashtag spam.

The whole thing was inspired by another Tumblr account I saw called scanwiches.

Now enter twenty20.com, basically a website for Instagram "photographers" to sell their images as stock photos.

As a young lad fresh out of university an accumulating student debt I just figured I'd give it a shot, I mean I didn't hold that much value to these photos anyway, so I went ahead and imported all of them, annoyingly it didn't bring across the metadata, so I did a few of them manually, and hey I made 1 buck or 2. - I guess people were buying my photos for a cookbook or something, but OK so now it was time to get serious, the challenge was I need to export all my Instagram metadata an import it onto my twenty20 account, and there was no way I was going to do this manually, so

I wrote a VbScript to download all the Metadata off my Instagram account. :)

x2 versions to be exact, one using the WScript interpreter and the other using CScript command line interpreter.

Obviously for this to work your Instagram account must be public. - I'm sure there's a way to do this from their API but the documentation sucks.

The WScript Version can be found here: InstaMeta_v2.0_w.vbs and can be run by double clicking on the file name in Windows, entering in your Instagram username when prompted, then wait for the program to respond with done, followed by the output filename.

For the CScript Version found here: InstaMeta_v2.0.vbs, you'll need to run it from the cscript.exe command line. - for example:

cscript C:\path\to\script\InstaMeta_v2.0.vbs username

Where username is your Instagram username.

The CSV output format is Description, Image file name, Instagram URL, and UNIX Timestamp, and the files default encoding is ANSI, however this can be changed to UTF by opening the file in notepad and saving it as UTF format.

Now I can also use this other neat little app that I found called Ripme (http://rip.rarchives.com) to mostly archive my Instagram account, using the file name in the CSV output file as the primary key to reference the images with.