InstaShow WordPress Instagram Feed Plugin Review PROS & CONS

How to create WordPress Instagram feed? Do WordPress and Instagram even go together hand by hand? Is it possible to have Instagram widget for WordPress on your blog/site?

Yes, to all questions. WordPress and Instagram really can go perfectly together using appropriate plugin. You have plenty of ways to add Instagram feed to WordPress, to create WordPress Instagram gallery or showcase your photos using widget.

Most plugins for making that possible are free. And there is big competition among them as there is so many ways to embed Instagram feed in WordPress. But if you don’t mind paying a bit, there are few outstanding options.

It’s amazing how Instagram growed in less than 4 years. It has become one of the best photo and video sharing applications around. After being launched in October 2010, it only took a couple of months for it to reach 1 million active users. Six months later, and the service had over 5 million users. Now that figure is about 200 million users.

Instagram is quite simple, yet highly addictive. The Instagram app lets you take a photo or video, enhance it using filters, and then upload it to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.

In addition to sharing your profile page with others, Instagram allows you to connect to the Instagram API and display your uploaded images on your website. This is not only a great way of sharing your images, it also encourages other Instagram users to follow you.

Finding the right plugin to display a widget of your latest Instagram photos in your sidebar, a full-blown Instagram powered gallery in a post or page, provide Instagram badges or counters, or even import your Instagram photos as WordPress posts can be a hard task.

 

WordPress Instagram Feed Plugin

Elfsight presents the entirely new product for creating unique galleries of Instagram photos in WordPress. It is called InstaShow. InstaShow is premium WordPress Instagram plugin for creating user-friendly, flexible and fully responsive galleries of Instagram images.

Once you start using, it will quickly become an essential tool to upload any photo from any public Instagram account or by any tag on your website. The plugin allows you to customize the look and feel of your WordPress Instagram gallery widget with hover styles and a popup overlay when clicked. It includes 10 color schemes and 50+ adaptable parameters.

 

 

WordPress Instagram Feed lets you display photos by username or by hashtag or using both indicators. You can even insert multi-tags and multi-usernames.

InstaShow gives you freedom in choosing the content of your gallery. It’s up to you how many different sources to point out.

Use additional conditions to filter Instagram photos or even exclude specific photos or photos which contain the specified hashtags or which refers to the certain authors.

This can be done using “except” filter, filter photos by @username, #hashtag or specific photo with “only” filter. If you want you can specify required number of loaded images to restrict their count with “limit” option.

Instagram feed plugin gives you the opportunity to set gallery’s height and width and to adjust the number of columns and rows. Images will automatically fit in the required space.

Other options are to control navigation and direction of the gallery, adjust the scrolling, switch on/off data in a gallery on image hover like comments counter, likes counter, and description.

 

Instagram Widget For WordPress

You can change colors of widget’s elements, customize UI and widget’s structure to find the most appropriate look for Instagram photos. The Instagram feed widget includes 14 adaptable parameters. Moreover, there are many UI parameters which you are able to change.

Different navigation elements allows you to choose the best way to scroll your gallery. You can choose from arrows, scroll or drag. Choose one of them or include all. Horizontal or vertical scrolling option is also available as well as autorotation and animation. Autorotation speed can be easily modified.

You can manually set the sizes of your widget. Control width, height and gutter between Instagram photos. Even the number of columns and rows can be set. So experiment and you could have different Instagram feed each day.

WordPress Instagram widget created with InstaShow will look great on handheld devices too. Just click “Responsive” and the widget’s width will adjust to any screen automatically.

There are 10 color schemes available to choose the basis. After that, you can set colors of 24 UI elements.

 

WordPress Instagram Feed Popup Data

Information is an essential part of any image. The best Instagram feed for WordPress provides guests with all sorts of data from Instagram accounts. With InstaShow you choose which data to display when someone clicks on image. You can show username, likes, comments, description, etc.

 

 

Choose which data to include and show to your audience in popup so visitors know more about each Instagram photo by clicking on it.

Settings available to switch on / off in popup info are: Username, Instagram link button, Likes counter, Comments counter, Location, Passed time, Description and Comments.

 

• Source – Use any combination of usernames and hashtags to display Instagram photos on your WordPress website/blog. It is up to you how many different sources to include.
• Filter – Filter Instagram photos by setting various conditions. Include or exclude images by using different combinations of @username, #hashtag and photo URL.
• Responsive – InstaShow looks good on any handheld device. No matter what is the size of the screen.
• Size – You can set number of columns and rows in the grid as well as gallery’s width, height and gutter between images.
• Direction – You are able to configure the movement of photos’ browsing. It can be horizontal or vertical.
• Navigation – Choose most convenient set of controls to navigate through your WordPress Instagram gallery. It can be arrows, scroll, drag or all of them.
• Languages – InstaShow is translated into 16 languages.
• Animation – There are two animations for images. Those are slide and fade. You can also choose animation speed.
• Style – You can set up colors of all gallery’s UI elements. There are 24 adjustable colors and 10 color schemes.
• Popup – Provide your visitors with the opportunity to look closer at any image and to discover all its data as if in Instagram without leaving your website.
• Live preview – All changes made will be instantly shown in live preview

 

What Is So Special With InstaShow? – How It Works?

After you install and activate the plugin, new menu named “InstaShow” will appear. To connect with Instagram you need Instagram access token.

It is very easy to connect. You will be redirected to Instagram and  after you login you will get message that you have successfully connected to Instagram.

You can then begin to configure your Instagram gallery by entering either a username or hashtag to search for. The images will then load on the right hand side.

 

 

On next tab you can set up sizes. You can set a height and width or leave these for auto sizes and enable the responsive option. You can set the number of columns and rows in the grid and also set the gutter width between images.

 

 

The UI tab is where you can set the controls for navigating your images. You can set the direction, controls, animation effect, popup image switch speed, popup image switch easing and language.

The “Info” tab is where you can configure the “Gallery Info” which is shown when you hover over an image and the “Popup Info” which will be displayed when the popup is triggered by a user.

 

 

In the “Style” tab you can set up the color scheme to be used from 10 different color schemes or you can customize each element individually to match it to your site.

The rest of sections are for enabling Analytics. This sends information back to the developer about usage of their plugin. You can disable this if you wish. The final section is “Get Shortcode” which is what you need to copy and paste into a post or page for the widget to appear.

 

 

You can also use InstaShow with one of the most popular page-builder plugins for WordPress – WPBakery (check WPBakery review). WPBakery InstaShow element is available with all customization opportunities.

InstaShow checks automatically for new updates. Just enter your CodeCanyon InstaShow purchase code and you will be notified and able to update the widget in WordPress admin panel if a new version is available.

 

InstaShow Review Pros & Cons

PROS

• Live updates
• Responsive
• Filter Instagram photos
• Option to pick what will be shown (username, comments…)
• You are able to limit the number of loaded images in the grid
• You are able to post non-square photos
• You can have more than one feed at the same time

CONS

• Shortcode can become very long depending on options you set

 

WordPress Instagram Feed InstaShow Final Words

Sometimes even free plugins cost too much to be worth installing. With so much choice, having to go back to the plugin repository to find out how a plugin works is as annoying as it is unacceptable.

Especially if you need to provide your Instagram username and password. You should always choose a plugin that does just what you want. With Instagram it is especially important.

For example, if you just want to show your latest photos in a sidebar widget, then get a plugin that does just that. Otherwise you might find that all starts to get complicated If you do go with a plugin that uses the Instagram API, keep in mind Instagram’s API Terms of Use.

Particularly the limit on the number of photos that can be displayed on a page and even more importantly respecting the rights on photos that you might pull from accounts other than your own.

I think that any plugin should be designed to be simple and intuitive to use. If a user might need extra help it should be provided in the settings screens. The InstaShow plugin excelled in making their configurable functionality easy to understand and set up.

Instagram feed is placed on any place on site using shortcode. You can even have more than one feed at the same time on same page/post if you want. But if you decide to make changes in your feed, you will need to generate new shortcode and place it on desired spot on website.

InstaShow is definitely an easy approach for sharing Instagram feed on any WordPress website. You will not be sorry for spending $19 on it. I recommended giving it a try or testing demo on official site.

If you need plugin for displaying social share buttons, then I recommend using ESSB (check Easy Social Share Buttons review) or Monarch plugin (check Monarch review). For automatically sharing published content to various social media sites, great choices are Blog2Social and SNAP (check Blog2Social vs Social Networks Auto Poster comparison).