Solving The Instagram Problem - How to Find Your Old Posts

I am not sure How I will stretch this to 600 hundred words to make the Vocal cut , because I could write one sentence, but then people wouldn’t notice it. So what is the secret?

Now I feel like so many of those articles in news feeds like “What is Bob Dylan’s Favourite Oasis Song'' and you read and read , skip the ads, accept the cookies , read and scroll and you still don’t find what Bob Dylan’s favourite Oasis song is. And eventually you shut that browser down , not the wiser for you tangential excursion to find out something your weren't interested in and didn’t want or need to know anyway.

Anyway I was writing a piece called “Picture This” about the fact that while new vinyl releases are much higher quality that in the sixties and seventies (RCA had a format called “Dynaflex” that basically seemed to cause the records to warp , not an ideal attribute of a perfect vinyl disc) but while the music is fine the packaging is generally imaginative and boring. There are coloured , sometimes multi coloured vinyls and pictured discs that are basically the normal cover fitted into a twelve inch diameter circle.

No here’s the issue, if you have a hundred or less posts on Instagram it is probably easy to find old posts but I have over 8000 and there is no search facility, so I have a three by twenty seven hundred list to scroll through in the hope of finding what you are looking for. You can search by strings or hashtags but you can't combine them so you may have photographed and hash tagged a photo with #GingerCat #Edinburgh but you can only search on one hashtag or string and if you want to include your user id then you can only search on that so I would get over eight thousand results, no use at all.

Chatting with a friend about another post I had done and then , I had a flash, create a unique tag for what you want. How do you make it unique? Well start with your Instagram user id , then add a few descriptive words. I wanted to tag my interesting vinyl records in my collection, most of which were listed in the “Picture This” post. The tag I used for this was #MikeydredsVinyLessence so thought I could use the “Picture This” links and and add the tags in my browser. Didn’t work., you cant edit instagram posts in your browser., just browse them.

So it was back to the phone and slowly scrolling through and editing where necessary and then picked out nearly thirty instances which are now literally at my fingertips. You can see the Curved Air "Air Conditioning" mandala one here then click on the hashtag to see all of them as listed in the image at the start of this story.

You need to pick a hashtag you will remember and that is not in use and personalise it for yourself. This then will make your Instagram pictures easy to find, although I’ll bet they’ll include a multi hashtag and string search , but it is great when a single click can do it for you.

I will now be identifying holiday snaps and videos that I normally have to scroll for ages to find. It is almost embarrassing when you tell someone you have a picture or video and then you can’t find it. Now you will really be able to find it. You can probably do this same thing with your Twitter posts as well, and all of a sudden things become easy to find.