Daily
Post Instagram Reels from a Drive folder
Videos you drop in a Drive folder are posted as Instagram Reels with captions, one at a time on your schedule.
- Runs
- Daily
- Apps
- Facebook Pages, Google Drive
- AI
- Yes, uses the built-in AI allowance
- Access
- drive; instagram_content_publish
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: every day at 6pm, take the next video from my Drive 'Reels' folder, write a caption, post it as an Instagram Reel, and move the file to 'Posted'.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A personal trainer films short workout clips on their phone and saves them to Drive, meaning to post one a day. In practice, uploading, writing captions and remembering which clips went out happens once a week at best.
Now one clip goes out as a Reel each evening with a caption written from its file name and notes. Posted clips move to another folder, so the trainer only has to keep filming.
What you get out of it
Daily Reels without daily effort
Fill the folder once a week and post every day.
Captions written for you
Each Reel gets a caption with hashtags from its title and notes.
No double posting
Clips move to a Posted folder after they go out.
Post at the best time
Reels go out at the hour your audience is most active.
How it works
What happens, step by step
Every day at your chosen time, ClickRuntime picks the next video in your Drive 'Reels' folder.
It gives Instagram a temporary link to the video and AI writes a caption.
It waits for Instagram to finish processing, then publishes the Reel.
The video moves to your 'Posted' folder so it isn't used again.
Before it runs live
- Connect Facebook Pages
- Connect Google Drive
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Run it at a different time, more or less often, or only on weekdays
- Change what the AI looks for, or how it writes the result
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Facebook Pages and Google Drive steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
import time
from google.oauth2.credentials import Credentials
from googleapiclient.discovery import build
from clickruntime import on_trigger, credentials, http, ai
IG_ID, REELS, POSTED, G = "17841400000000000", "folder-reels-id", "folder-posted-id", "https://graph.facebook.com/v21.0"
@on_trigger
def run(event):
drive = build("drive", "v3", credentials=Credentials(credentials.connection("google", "work")), cache_discovery=False)
files = drive.files().list(q=f"'{REELS}' in parents and mimeType contains 'video/'", orderBy="createdTime",
fields="files(id,name,description,webContentLink)", pageSize=1).execute()["files"]
if not files:
return {"posted": False}
f = files[0]
drive.permissions().create(fileId=f["id"], body={"type": "anyone", "role": "reader"}).execute()
caption = ai.generate(f"Instagram Reel caption with 3 hashtags for a workout clip: {f['name']} {f.get('description', '')}",
max_output_tokens=120).text.strip()
t = {"access_token": credentials.connection("facebook", "work")}
c = http.post(f"{G}/{IG_ID}/media", data={**t, "media_type": "REELS", "video_url": f["webContentLink"], "caption": caption}).json()["id"]
for _ in range(20):
if http.get(f"{G}/{c}", params={**t, "fields": "status_code"}).json()["status_code"] == "FINISHED":
break
time.sleep(10)
reel = http.post(f"{G}/{IG_ID}/media_publish", data={**t, "creation_id": c}).json()
drive.permissions().delete(fileId=f["id"], permissionId="anyoneWithLink").execute()
drive.files().update(fileId=f["id"], addParents=POSTED, removeParents=REELS).execute()
return {"reel": reel.get("id")}FAQ
Common questions
What video format works best?
How long does posting take?
Does my Instagram need to be a business account?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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Set up “Post Instagram Reels from a Drive folder” from your assistant
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