Reposting

Discover (Posts > Discover) watches other people's Instagram accounts and lets you share their posts on your own.

Use it when you sell other developers' projects and want to keep your own feed full of what those developers are publishing, without visiting sixty profiles by hand every week.

Repost in three steps#

1. Watch the accounts you want to repost from.
2. Pick posts in the grid with one click each.
3. Add them to the planner, spread across the weeks ahead.

Watching an account#

1. Type what the account does into the box on the left, for example "real estate dubai".
2. Press the button. You get back a list of matching accounts with their pictures and names.
3. Click one to start watching it.

If you already know the handle, put an @ in front of it, or paste the profile link. It is added straight away, without the search step.

A bare word searches rather than adding because searching for a developer by name usually turns up the real account and three or four impersonating it with almost the same name. The list shows a blue tick next to the verified one, which is generally the one you want.

Gene App checks the account exists, reads its newest posts straight away (about two dozen), and adds it to the list. From then on, each watched account is checked about once an hour, and anything new appears in the grid.

To go further back than that, see Older posts.

Note

The account has to be public. A private account cannot be read by anybody, including us, and Gene App says so rather than adding it and failing quietly later.

Watching is not following#

Instagram gives no app the right to follow an account on your behalf, so watching an account here only decides whose posts Gene App reads each hour. The account you watch is never notified and never sees a follow from you.

You do not have to watch an account to repost from it. Open any account you found, open one of its posts and press Add to the planner: that post is copied onto your planner on its own. The account's popup starts with its newest posts; press Load more at the bottom to page further back, and posts from those pages can be added the same way.

Picking posts#

Click a post to pick it. Click again to unpick. There is no separate select mode: one click is the whole interaction.

• Show switches the grid between newest first and most liked first. Most liked is the one to use when you are filling a month in one sitting: it puts the developer's best performing posts at the top rather than whatever they happened to publish yesterday.
• Each tile carries its like count, so you can see what you are choosing. Some accounts hide their like counts. Those posts show no number and sit at the end of the most-liked view, rather than being treated as posts that got no likes.
• Hide removes posts you do not want from the grid. They will not come back the next time the account is checked.
• Each tile links out to the original on Instagram, so you can see the real post before deciding.

The grid shows up to 200 posts at once across all your watched accounts. Pick one account on the left to see only its posts.

Older posts#

Watching an account reads its newest posts and then only what is new, so a developer who posts several times a day pushes last month's posts out of reach quickly. To get them back:

1. Pick the account on the left.
2. Press Load older posts under the grid.

Each press reads the next stretch further back and adds it to the grid, where you pick those posts like any other. Press again to keep going. The button disappears once the account has nothing older, and says so if a press found nothing new.

Older posts are read for one account at a time, so with all accounts showing, the grid asks you to pick one first.

Adding them to the calendar#

Once you have picked some, a bar appears at the top. Choose:

• Spread over a week, a month or three months.
• From what time of day the posts should start going out.
• Which networks they go to.
• Whether to credit the account.

Press Add to the planner.

The posts are spread evenly across the window you chose, not queued back to back:

• Twelve posts over a month land on twelve different days.
• More posts than days means several on some days, spaced hours apart rather than all at once.
• Nothing is ever scheduled in the past.

From there they are ordinary planned posts. They appear on the calendar, and you can drag them to different days, edit the captions, or delete them.

Crediting#

Credit is on by default, and it appends 📷 @theirhandle to the caption. If the caption already mentions that account, nothing is added.

It is worth leaving on. Reposting a developer's photography onto your own feed without naming them is the fastest way to fall out with the people whose content your feed depends on.

What actually gets copied, and when#

Until you pick a post, Gene App holds nothing but a link to it. The pictures live on Instagram's servers and the grid shows them from there.

The moment you add posts to the planner, the pictures are downloaded and stored in your own workspace. That is deliberate: those Instagram links expire after a while, and a post scheduled for three weeks' time cannot depend on one still working.

Note

The post is a copy taken at the moment you queued it. If the developer edits or deletes their original afterwards, yours is unaffected and still goes out as it was.

Videos and carousels#

• A carousel comes across as a carousel, up to ten pictures.
• A video comes across as a video.
• A carousel that mixes video and pictures is reposted as just its pictures, because no network has a post that is a video and photos at once.

What this needs#

Two things, and the second one costs money.

• A one-time database update for reposting.
• A paid service to read Instagram. Instagram's own API only ever shows an app the accounts it administers, at any permission level. There is no way to read another business's posts with the connection you already have: no permission to request, no Meta review that grants it, nothing to upgrade to.

Reading other accounts therefore needs a paid third-party service, so the deployment has to be given a RapidAPI subscription. That is on the Gene team rather than on you. Until it is set, the Discover tab opens and says so, and nothing else on the Posts page is affected.