How I Solved Instagram’s Hashtag Problem

To be honest, I was quite frustrated typing out hashtags while posting my photos to Instagram.

While there are some websites that offers curated hashtags for Instagram, and apps too, but none of them proved to be completely helpful.

Why?

In this busy world, people want to skip boring tasks and try to automate them, so do I. Inserting or typing out 10–15 hashtags for every photo that you post on Instagram is quite a tedious and boring task.

Upon searching for some apps on Android which suggests Instagram hashtags, I found a handful to be worthy. However, all of them had one common fallback.

None of them actually inserted the hashtags to the caption area of my Instagram photo. Instead, I had to switch to that different app while posting something on Instagram, find and copy the tags, switch back to Instagram and paste the tags there.

Convenience Level = Not Much

I truly believed that automation is the key to this problem here, and so I began exploring for ways to automate this task.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. — Bill Gates

How?

Unable to find a proper solution to this, I started building an app for Android named Magnify for Instagram, which would elegantly solves this classic problem and some more.

Firstly, I curated some great hashtags for each photo category like Nature, Travel, Food, etc.

Then I jumped into Android to handle the rest of the solution. Android has a feature called Accessibility Service which is designed to assist disabled people in using an Android device. I tapped into that feature to automate this mundane task for everyone using Instagram on Android.

In a gist, this is how it works,

• You install the app on your phone, and turn on the Accessibility Service for the app
• You select a photo in the Instagram app as you would normally do, apply any filters if you want, proceed
• Now, while typing the caption, you type the magical word magnify_keyword. For example, magnify_urban, magnify_nature, magnify_food, etc.
• Give a space and voila, all tags related to the keyword are automatically placed there

This removes all the step that you would normally do, such as copying and pasting the tags, while keeping you in the normal Instagram photo sharing flow.

Here’s a video demo, of how it works,

Convenience Level = Thug Life

I think this was a classic problem that many people faced while adding the relevant hashtags to their photos on Instagram, and I am glad to have solved this for all other photo lovers like me.

Let me know your thoughts on this, and how this can be made better.