UPDATE:
Instagram now allow uploads from your gallery, making this post redundant. 🙂

A few days ago Instagram added the ability to upload short video clips as well as photos using its mobile app. In the same way as Vine though, you can’t upload videos that are pre recorded, you have to take the video there and then using the built in camcorder.

While playing around the other day I found a way to do it though, here’s how it works on Android, although I assume the process would be similar for iOS, but I haven’t had a chance to look yet.

For proof, see my test video

You’ll need a rooted Android device for this to work.

My first clue was that just after you press the ‘next’ button after recording a video, a small JSON file /data/data/com.instagram.android/files/pending_media.json gets created. This contains the path to a temporary video file, along with other data which gets sent to the Instagram API.

Step 1.

Open up Instagram and record a short video up to the marker. It doesn’t matter what of, as we won’t be using this.

Step 2.

Now in a file manager head to /storage/sdcard0/Android/data/com.instagram.android/files/videos/ or where ever the path is in you pending_media.json file.

Step 3.

In that videos directory, you’ll see a new directory dated with todays date. Open that and you’ll see the video we just made.

Step 4.

Next we need to overwrite that video with the one we want to upload. It needs to be around 10seconds long, and not too large, otherwise the upload will fail. Copy over the orignal file with your new one, making sure to keep the file name the same.

Step 5.

Re open Instagram, and then press the ‘next’ arrow. After a few seconds processing, you should see your pre-recorded video. It can now be uploaded as normal.

There is another directory called ‘music’ which contains the audio of the original video.

I had an issue with some videos not being rotated properly. Within the pending_media.json file there is an ‘orientation’ attribute, which was set to 0. Setting it to 1 before upload didn’t solve it, so I ended up rotating the videos 270 before upload.

Let me know how you get on with this!