Frequently as a photographer and business owner, I get contacted by other photographers with questions about equipment, photographing, posing, branding, or website details.  I have decided to begin answering some of them on the blog in an “Ask Anything” series in case others have the same questions!  If you have a question about these topics or anything else photography/business related that you would like to go in the series, please send me an email at jill@jillgumphotography.com with “ask anything” in the subject and maybe yours will get posted (anonymously, of course! ;-)).

The first one I am going to post is about having an instagram feed in the bottom of certain (or all!) pages on my website. I had first seen this on some photographer friend’s pages, and loved it, both for beauty and also for accessibility to their full Instagram feeds.  Because Instagram is a visually based app, usually those pictures are lovely and tell a fun story, so it was just interesting to see on someone’s blog. I had asked one of those friends about their method, using a separate plugin in their prophoto blog, but after adding that to my own page I became uncomfortable with doing it through another app (using an app to access an app…I guess it just seemed odd to me!) so after some more research, I learned that I could do it right through a prophoto widget! If you don’t use prophoto you probably have NO clue what I am talking about, but it’s basically a feature within wordpress that enables the creator to perform certain functions- in this case, having my instagram feed show up and automatically update on my website!

So if you are a prophoto user and are interested in how to do this, here are the steps!

1). Make sure that your instagram account is linked to your prophoto through your prophoto settings in the main sidebar (prophoto > customize > site settings).

2). Find “widgets” under the “Appearance” menu in your main sidebar and click.

3). Scroll down near the bottom, or look for “Prophoto Instagram Widget”.  Once you click, you will have to determine where you want your feed to appear.  I have mine at the bottom, as you can see when you click here.  To get that look, I selected “footer column 4”.

4). Then find “footer column 4”, or wherever you chose for the widget to go, on the upper right side of the same page (the widgets page).  When you click on the arrow next to the label, it should expand to say “prophoto instagram widget”.  Then when you click on that, you will be given all sorts of customizable options in terms of how you want them to display, how large, what pages you want it to appear on, etc. I played with these until I loved the way it looked!  This is how mine look.

5). Check your page, and make sure it looks how you want!  It will auto-populate your posts shortly after you make them, and people will be taken to your instagram feed if they click on any of the previews!

Hope you enjoy, and feel free to send your Ask Anything questions to me for future posts!