Posting Video on Instagram Using Hooks

Instagram Video iPhone Hook

I came up with the idea to allow my app to accept the instagram:// URL schema. The hook from Flipagram opened up in my app as the following:

instagram://library?AssetPath=assets-library%3A%2F%2Fasset%2Fasset.mp4%3Fid%3D8864C466-A45C-4C48-B76F-E3C421711E9D%26ext%3Dmp4&InstagramCaption=Some%20Preloaded%20Caption

The undocumented iPhone hook that allows you to automatically select assets from the iPhones photo roll, and preload a caption for the video. This should give you the same user experience that Flipagrams app has with sharing a video to Instagram.

NSURL *videoFilePath = ...; // Your local path to the video
NSString *caption = @"Some Preloaded Caption";
ALAssetsLibrary *library = [[ALAssetsLibrary alloc] init];
[library writeVideoAtPathToSavedPhotosAlbum:[NSURL URLWithString:videoFilePath] completionBlock:^(NSURL *assetURL, NSError *error) {
    NSURL *instagramURL = [NSURL URLWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"instagram://library?AssetPath=%@&InstagramCaption=%@",[assetURL absoluteString].percentEscape,caption.percentEscape]];
    if ([[UIApplication sharedApplication] canOpenURL:instagramURL]) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:instagramURL];
    }
}];

Works great!

Update:
Instagram has removed the ability to pass the caption to their app. The best solution now it to just copy the desired caption to the paste board.

Instagram hooks pre-select media issue

instagram://library?AssetPath=\(assetsLibraryUrl)
stopped working a while ago. Instagram developers probably moved to Photos framework and no longer use the AssetsLibrary.

Having this assumption I tried several other parameter names and found that instagram://library?LocalIdentifier=\(localID) where localId is the localIdentifier of your PHAsset works for now.

This is still as undocumented as it was so it can break in any future version of the Instagram.

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