# 05 · Claude IG Post Manager

Create and publish Instagram carousels without the usual design and publishing routine. The carousels are built
in HTML, rendered into 4:5 slides or a short video cover, uploaded to your own media host, published to
Instagram from the terminal, and the stats are read back a day later.

**For your AI:** walk me through building this one step at a time. Ask about my brand look and how I post today
first. Don't move on until the current step works.

## First, check

- Do you pay for a scheduler like Later or Buffer, or a designer for every carousel?
- Do you post carousels every week? If it's once a month, Canva and the app are enough.

## What you need

- An Instagram professional account (business or creator).
- A Meta developer app with Instagram content publishing permission, and a token for your account.
- A browser automation tool (Playwright) to turn HTML slides into pictures.
- A place to host the pictures at a public https address for a few minutes (Cloudflare R2 with a small Worker).
- Claude Code or another AI that can run commands on your computer.

## Where it runs

On your computer, plus the small media host online.

## The steps

1. **Your look, written down.** Fonts, colours, margins, the slide size (1080 x 1350), how many words a slide.
   Your AI builds every carousel from these rules.
2. **Slides in HTML.** One file holds all the slides. Words in one place, so a change is one edit.
3. **Render.** A script turns each slide into a picture (JPEG for Instagram) and checks that no words sit too
   close to the edge.
4. **Host.** Upload the pictures to your media host and get a public link for each.
5. **Publish.** Through Instagram's API: one container per slide, one carousel container, then publish. The
   API takes up to 10 slides; the app takes 20, so post longer ones by hand.
6. **Read back.** A day later, read the post's reach, views, likes, saves and shares, and keep them next to
   the post's folder.
7. **Clean up.** Delete the hosted copies once Instagram has them.

## Checklist before you rely on it

- [ ] Nothing publishes without you saying so. A post can't be unpublished by the tool.
- [ ] The token lives in a secure place, never in a file or chat.
- [ ] You look at every slide before it goes out (a render can be right in code and wrong on a phone).
- [ ] The caption is checked for line breaks and length.
- [ ] Each post has its own folder with the slides, caption and stats, so you can learn from them later.