As many of the readers of this humble site will know, I’m a big fan of building and monetizing social media properties (e.g. Facebook pages, primarily using Luke Kling’s excellent FPTraffic software, which I review here).
At the heart of this audience-building, traffic-generating, money-making system is the content you post to your Facebook pages.
Video is king, but coming up with original video that doesn’t violate strict copyright rules (and doing it on a mass scale) is almost impossible.
Text-only posts on Facebook generally get poor engagement, so that leaves images.
Let’s say you’re building a Facebook page about The Simpsons (I’m actually doing this at the moment). Where can you find picture content, such as memes, quotes, or merchandise to repost?
Some sources include:
- Google Images (search “Simpsons memes, Homer Simpson quotes” etc)
- Bing
- Other Facebook pages
- Amazon
But the holy grail of images these days is Instagram.
Searches like #thesimpsons yield thousands upon thousands of great images that could be kryptonite for your social audiences!
The problem with Instagram is that it has never been easy to nab a whole bunch of images in one go. For example, you can’t use the FPTraffic Chrome extension to grab a year’s worth of images for your Simpsons page from an Instagram profile or hashtag search. You can’t even right click to save as on desktop … the only real way to nab images from Insta is to sit there and screencap on your phone and then crop. Fine for one or two images, but not suitable for mass memeing!
As luck would have it, there’s a solution. This is a quick tutorial that will teach you what you need to do in order to get loads of images from an Instagram search or profile with a few mouse clicks (and potentially a whole lot of hard drive space).
All you need is Chrome browser – I’ve only tested this on Windows but should work as well on Mac – and an Instagram profile or hashtag results page from which you wish to download the images.
How To Do It
For this example I’m going to use my own personal Instagram profile.
The first step is to open up the search page or profile you want to download from.
The second step is to scroll as far down the page as you want (if you don’t scroll, you’ll only get the images that are visible within your screen area AFAIK) to get more images. This is especially relevant on hashtag results pages.
The third step is to right click on blank space on the webpage and select “Save As”. In the popup window choose to save as complete webpage, as per below:
Now open your downloads folder and there should be an HTML page as well as a folder:
Open up the folder, and voila you’ve got all the images you had visible on that Instagram profile (or hashtag search page – the process is the same):
You can now upload these into your FPTraffic queue using the bulk upload option, and then sort through and eliminate the images you don’t want to post.
How easy is that?
Just a word of warning – downloading heaps of images at once (e.g. from a hashtag search) can use lots of bandwith and also lots of hard drive space. Be wary if you’re using a capped data connection or a computer with a small hard drive.
NB: Use this method at your own discretion and be aware of copyright rules etc. I can’t take any responsibility for the manner in which you use this image collection technique.