Another cooking video Instagram
I’ve always enjoyed Tasty videos. They’re quick and make the recipe look easy. I also always wanted to create a funny bot account. The idea of taking the familiar style of Tasty and Nifty videos, but zooming them in a little too close to see what’s going on seemed funny to me.
The results are silly but also sometimes pretty artsy.
Unfortunately, Instagram is difficult to work with programmatically, and I didn’t want to run a server just for this project. Plus with all the free time during lockdown, I might as well just post them myself and revisit making a bot if it felt worthwhile.
Using Python and instaloader downloading software, I created a system to create cropped videos.
The main function of step 2 looks like this:
# crop.py
for f in all_in_files:
split = f.split(".", 1)
# isCroppable: if the end is mp4 and has not been processed yet
if isCroppable(split, f):
# create a randomly cropped video
crop_video(f)
# get the caption with appended hashtags and copy it
caption = get_caption(split[0])
copy(caption)
print('COPIED:\n' + caption + '\n')
# log the video as cropped and posted
log(f)
break
Oh-ho yes