Instagram is embeddable - finally

Today in “about bloomin’ time” news: Instagram introduces web embeds. Up until now, using an Instagram image in your article or post involved downloading it and adding it into your CMS. Now, you just embed it with a tiny chunk of HTML. The image above is an embed.

To grab the code, just go to the web page with the image, and click on the sharing icon (the box with an arrow coming out of it):

It’s astonishing it’s taken this long to happen. The inclusion of embeds was the critical factor behind the growth of both Flickr and YouTube in their early days. Has it really taken Instagram this long to notice that half the web is already embedding their images?

Generally, this is good news for journalism businesses, though. A lot of the lingering copyright worries about using Instagram images from news events can be alleviated by using the embed code which always links back to the creator’s own Instagram stream.