Cannot share on Instagram

Hi Fab, thanks for your patience while we work through a backlog of support requests.

A few things:

• I see you mention an Instagram Business account – that’s a good start! Do you have the account linked to a Facebook account? If not, make sure you’ve done that.
• We have some general connection troubleshooting here. Please check that out.
• Are the images in your post JPG/JPEG format? This is the format required by Instagram. Please see more specifics about image requirements in our documentation here.

If none of the above sorts it, can you share your site’s address with us here so we can troubleshoot further? Thanks!

Hi Jen,

No worries and thank you for coming back to me.

My site’s address is https://afatherwalk.wordpress.com/

I have checked all of the above and it is not working.

Although I am not a WordPress specialist, I work in IT, so I have checked carefully all settings, even removed both facebook and instagram business connection to create them again after a while.

The site is connected with:

• Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/afatherwalk/
• Instagram Business – https://www.instagram.com/afatherwalk/
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/a-father-walk/
• Tumblr – https://www.tumblr.com/blog/afatherwalk
• Mastodon – https://mastodon.social/@afatherwalk

I create a post for example a simple page “test” with short text, and a feature picture format jpg, I post and it appears everywhere apart on the Instagram Business account (the posts that are there I have created manually to ensure the post are everywhere).

Really not sure what to do or where to look.

Many thanks for your help

Kind regards

Fab

Hi Fab!

First of all, sorry for the inconvenience. I took a look, and I think I found the problem. The image you tried to share does not meet the Instagram requirements via the API. For example, on this post, the attached picture is over 55 MB, where the maximum allowed for Instagram is 8 MB. It works if you upload it manually because Instagram does some conversions in the background.

Are you using the old Classic editor? If so, I would suggest using the Gutenberg Block editor instead, where we have media validation that helps notice if the media is invalid while creating a post. We also added a feature lately that tries to convert invalid images to pass the social network requirements, kind of the same as Instagram would do when uploading directly to it.

I hope this helps; I am happy to assist further if needed.

Thanks,
Gergely

Hi Gergely,

Thank you for your response.

I will check the image size for sure and verify the size.

For the editor, your mentioned “Are you using the old Classic editor?”
But how do you check this?

I have Jetpack on the iPhone and I have used the default interface from the computer.

Thanks

Fab

@gmjuhasz : I have checked https://afatherwalk.wordpress.com/2023/09/24/in-love-frozen/ and the related image in the library, the image is 5.28 MB.
Where did you get the 55MB?

Thanks

@gmjuhasz

I have just published the post https://afatherwalk.wordpress.com/2023/09/27/heartstrings-and-silent-battles/

The image is 2.6 MB and still not showing on Instagram (I will post it later)

Thanks

Pardon me, I looked at the wrong image as an example. That image does not meet this point from the docs:

Resolution: Instagram recommends an image width between 320px and 1440px.

{"media_data":{"width":2698,"height":3597}}

For the last post the same thing happened, where the width of the image was greater than Instagram’s 1440px.

I am sorry again that this causes trouble for you. I mentioned the auto-conversion feature, which was just developed for Jetpack sites; we do our best to ship that for wordpress.com sites, too.

Gergely

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Gergely J.

Ok thank you for checking

I have tried a new one by reducing the width to 1440 but no luck either.

I will try the next one from Jetpack and the iPhone next time.

Thank you

Yeah, now that’s fine, but Instagram has aspect ratio limitations too, which should be between 0.8 and 1.91. With that image now it was 1440 / 1920 = 0.75.

Again, I want to say sorry for all these restrictions. Unfortunately, the Instagram API is not as forgiving as the other services. Our auto-conversion feature should be available soon when the development is finished for WPCOM sites, making this much more accessible.

Gergely

Thank you @gmjuhasz

Do you have any idea when this will happen?

Thanks

Hey @afatherwalk – currently we don’t have an exact timeline for when this update will take effect but am confident that it will happen shortly. In matters such as this, it is not always possible to determine an exact estimated time.