Since Instagram made some big changes back in June, some Instagram widgets stopped working. If you blog on WordPress, you have a lot of choices for Instagram widgets, but with Blogger, less so. So I put together a quick tutorial on how to add an Instagram widget to your Blogger blog using Snapwidget (the go-to site for Blogger Instagram widgets).
Step 1:
Go to www.snapwidget.com and sign up for a new account.
Step 2:
In the dashboard, click on the blue Create a New Widget button in the upper right corner.
Step 3:
Select your widget. For the purpose of this tutorial I am selecting the most popular widget, which is a photo grid. This is the first widget on the left. Just click on the Create Your Widget link.
Step 4:
Type your Instagram username into the Username box. A popup window will open prompting you to log into Instagram. Go ahead and log into your Instagram account.
Step 5:
After logging in you will be returned to the widget layout. Copy the settings in the screenshot above. You can adjust the Thumbnail Size, but since you should select “Responsive” (meaning widget will fit to width of sidebar according to screen size) the thumbnail size does not matter as much. In the layout section, you can choose how many photos across and how many photos down that you want to display. You can select a hover effect if you wish, and if you want to show social media sharing buttons (I think they look a little messy but that’s just me). You can always go back and edit your widget so if you don’t like it after you have pasted it in your blog, you can revise. When you have entered your settings, just click on the blue Get Widget button in the lower right corner of the page.
Step 6:
The widget code is automatically generated for you. Simply highlight the code in the popup window and click Copy to Clipboard or use Command + C in Mac or CTRL + C in Windows and it will be copied to your computer.
Step 7:
Now, log into your Blogger blog. In the Dashboard, go to Layout. On the sidebar, just click on the Add a Gadget link. Then select the HTML/Javascript gadget.
Step 8:
Now just paste the code into the widget, give it a title if you wish, and click the Save button. Now, when you view your live blog, you will have a lovely little Instagram widget that will automatically pull your latest photos from Instagram to your Blogger blog. If you want to change the layout (eg. show more photos, add more columns, etc., just go back to Step 5 in Snapwidget and adjust the layout, then follow all of the rest of the steps again to replace. If you have questions, feel free to comment below!
