InstaFix Revived

Better Instagram previews for chats — public posts, Reels, thumbnails, captions, and playable media when available.

InstaFix Revived is a maintained, lightweight continuation of Wikidepia/InstaFix. It fixes the boring/broken Instagram embeds you often get in Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, and other chat apps by serving cleaner OpenGraph/Twitter-card preview pages.

Preview

Use a preview link from your own InstaFix Revived instance to get a cleaner embed in a chat app:

Quick start: run your own instance

The hosted demo is currently unavailable. You can run InstaFix Revived yourself on a domain you control. For a local test with Docker Compose:

git clone https://github.com/Bl0ck154/InstaFix-Revived.git
cd InstaFix-Revived
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env for your neutral public origin and optional recovery settings.
docker compose -f docker-compose.example.yml up -d --build

The example binds the app to 127.0.0.1:3000 by default. Use your own hostname and an HTTPS reverse proxy if you want to make it public. The optional authenticated helper is disabled unless you select its Compose profile and provide your own cookie file. See TESTING.md and .env.example for other options.

Reel recovery: When a public Reel is unavailable through logged-out GraphQL, InstaFix can try Instagram's crawler-rendered page and recognize Reel links shared under /p/. The optional Jina metadata reader is disabled by default; enable INSTAFIX_JINA_METADATA_FALLBACK=true only if you agree to send public post URLs to that external service. Jina supplies metadata/classification, never media bytes. All crawler requests honor the configured proxy-only restrictions.

Domain configuration: Set INSTAFIX_PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://previews.your-domain.example before starting your public instance. The converter, canonical links, sitemap, robots.txt and preview metadata then use that origin instead of any previous deployment's hostname. Use a neutral name to avoid trademark problems.

What it does

• Creates cleaner rich previews for public Instagram posts and Reels.
• Shows author, caption, thumbnail, and media metadata where available.
• Supports image and video preview routes.
• Keeps normal browser media traffic lightweight with direct redirects.
• Includes an optional local auth-helper for difficult/restricted cases.
• Includes an optional public GraphQL proxy pool for anonymous fetches, disabled by default.
• Emits additional image tags for carousel previews where clients support them.
• Includes an optional selective video proxy for preview bots, disabled by default.
• Avoids exposing direct Instagram CDN URLs in the minimal homepage JSON preview API.
• Uses a Telegram-specific oversized-Reel fallback, based on August 2026 measurements: originals at or below 20 MiB stay direct; larger fresh previews are compacted below the measured limit.
• Can emit an optional daily Telegram operations report with per-Reel decisions (direct, compact, expected image, blocked) and media sizes.

Telegram Reel previews

In testing on August 26, 2026, Telegram's fresh WebPage video ingestion had a 20 MiB boundary: 20,971,520 bytes is accepted, while 20,971,521 bytes is not attached as the preview video document. InstaFix Revived therefore keeps small originals untouched and, for Telegram only, uses a fast DASH video+audio remux for oversized Reels. The compact path uses stream copy rather than an automatic x264 re-encode.

The investigation also ruled out several misleading causes such as OG tag order, redirects, Cloudflare proxying and simple hostname changes. Older >20 MiB previews can still appear to work when Telegram already has a historical media document cached.

See Telegram Reel previews: current design and the 20 MiB boundary for the measured behavior, fallback design, cache notes and monitoring fields.

Optional Cloudflare edge

InstaFix does not require a Cloudflare Worker. A normal Caddy/Nginx/reverse-proxy deployment is enough. Self-hosters who want an optional edge layer can start from the generic Cloudflare Worker example. It contains no production-specific routes, diagnostics, account IDs, or secrets.

Why this exists

Instagram links often preview poorly outside Instagram. Sometimes the caption is missing, sometimes Reels do not play, and sometimes the preview is just ugly or incomplete.

InstaFix Revived sits between the chat app and Instagram, reads public metadata, and returns a small preview page with friendlier embed tags.

Related project

Want to automatically repost new Instagram photos, Reels and carousels to a Telegram channel, instead of fixing link previews? See Instagram → Telegram. It uses GitHub Actions and Apify and does not require a running server or an Instagram password for public profiles. The projects are independent.

Support the project

If you self-host this project or find the code useful, a star on GitHub helps a lot.

You can also support the maintainer here:

• GitHub: @Bl0ck154
• GitHub Sponsors: github.com/sponsors/Bl0ck154
• Buy Me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/bl0ck
• PayPal: paypal.me/IlliaZabolotskyi

Deployment and trademark considerations

The previous hosted demo is offline following a trademark complaint about its domain. The source remains available. Choose a neutral domain for self-hosting, keep backups of DNS and deployment configuration, and do not rely on project disclaimers as trademark protection.

Attribution

Maintained by Bl0ck154.

Derived from and inspired by Wikidepia/InstaFix.

Instagram is a trademark of Instagram, Inc. This project is independent and is not affiliated with Instagram, Meta, or Instagram, Inc.