Outside my dayjob at Tines I am a miniature painter. And within that hobby the standard is pretty much to use Instagram as your portfolio.
I tend to always gather a backlog of painted models and then spend a day taking photos and editing pictures for a few months worth of models. But the Instagram algorithm tends to punish you for bulk posting
And because of that i pretty much stopped updating my instagram over a year ago.
I have tried a couple of different services and processes to manage and schedule posts, they all felt like massive overkill for the simple scheduler I wanted, had a monthly subscription or they had so many strange limited on free versions.
So decided to throw 3B at it!
I asked 3B for a simple Instagram schedule, (and because I am lazy I figured to throw some AI into the mix to help with captions and hashtags
)
I need to build an instagram scheduler and poster.
I need to be able to upload a couple of pictures,
Pictures should then be run through an AI to provide a small text and appropriate hashtags
There should also be a small sections to add more info that will be passed to the AI to help with the text
Then review and schedule the time to post.
There also need to be a bulk method where I can upload multiple sets of photos, and plan them all
One wall i ran into was the instagram API is only available with a Meta developer account, and having to register an app, and would only work with a business account. So I could not make it auto post for me.
So a little bit of back and forth with 3B it suggested a phone link on each post that just works like a share button, and copies the caption and hashtags to clipboard, and I get that link mailed to me at the scheduled posting time.
It all allows me to go through the process of posting in just a couple of clicks on my phone.
After the first draft I had to ask 3B to make it looks a little instagramy and i think it worked ![]()
(my usual test images are always some of my pet rats)
And the bulk planner where I can just throw a whole set of photos at it:
And finally the posting queue
30 min in 3B (my lunch break) allowed me to build the exact app i wanted (without all the features I didnt need) that was available in 3rd party services. And I love this app!
And shameless self promotion: https://www.instagram.com/hawking_painting
In conclusion:
There is a lot of services out there that could have done this for me, but they would come at a monthly subscription, I would only use a fraction of the features available.
So building a the simple core “product” in Tines 3B that I had been dreaming off for years was just so much nicer!


