How many photos did you like on Instagram this year? I liked 945 Instagram photos in 2015. How do I know? I built this collage and counted the number of photos.
How do you make a collage like this?
- Sign into gramfeed.com on the desktop. Gramfeed’s desktop interface is much better than Instagram’s.
- Go to your favorites page at gramfeed.com/instagram/likes
- Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and keep scrolling. Scrolling. Scrolling. Until you hit the start of 2015.
- In your browser, go to File > Save Page As… I used Firefox. Not sure if Chrome will work, I’m assuming it would.
- Saving the webpage will grab ALL the images on the page. You probably don’t want the profile pics for each user. All the username pics are saved with an ending of “_a.jpeg“. The regular 300×300-pixel pics end with “_n.jpeg” Do a search in the folder for the filename containing: “_a.jpg“, then delete all those profile pics.
- Now you need to figure out the grid. I have 945 photos, so I googled “square root of 945.” The answer google gives is 30.74. round that baby up, and you got the number of rows and columns you want to use.
- For your canvas size, multiple the number of rows by 300, and that’s your canvas size you’ll use. If you don’t have Indesign, then well, you’ll need to find some other way of getting your Instagram likes into one collage. At least you have them all now! In my case I multiplied 31 by 300 and got 9300. So the canvas size is 9300 pixels by 9300 pixels. Wow! I’m using Adobe InDesign for my layout. You might be able to use some other program like Microsoft Word (I guess). For those using Adobe Indesign, make sure you have intent set to web, so you can use pixel dimensions. Also, that gutter has gotta be at 0px, so you don’t have any space between the photos.
- Take all the 300×300-pixel images and drag them all into your page. Do that trick where you make a grid of a certain amount of rows and columns in InDesign. As you drag your mouse you use the arrow key to increase the number of rows and columns. Yeah, I’m not explaining that well, so you can learn about that trick on Adobe’s site.
- Now export the page as a jpg, using the resolution of 72 dpi.
- Boom! You now have a jpg of all the images you liked on Instagram in one year. Just make sure you don’t sell this or anything, because you are using other people’s photos. ONLY FOR PERSONAL USE!
945 seems like a large number, but having all the photos together in one collage makes 945 seem rather small. You spend all this time liking photos on Instagram, so to have a momento of the year is fun. Doing the same with your own photos would make a nice complement.
What’s your guess as to how many photos you liked on Instagram this year?
— Spudart Matt Maldre (@spudart) December 10, 2015
Please leave your number via Twitter or in the comments.