ShootCal Social Feed

No. Instagram only lets apps show posts from Creator or Business accounts, so a personal account cannot connect. Switching is free: open your profile in the Instagram app, tap the menu, then tap Account type and tools and Switch to professional account. You can switch back at any time. The Connect with Facebook flow also needs that account linked to a Facebook Page you manage.

Yes. In ShootCal Apps > Social Feed, select the Import from Smash Balloon button after connecting the same Instagram account. The separate walkthrough guides you through preparation, feed selection, previews, and switching. Saved definitions can be read while Smash Balloon is active, inactive, or removed, provided its data remains in the database. Supported single-account grid feeds can become new ShootCal presets. You can also explicitly map an old feed ID to an existing ShootCal preset, including when the old settings cannot be converted automatically. Leave Smash Balloon active during import and preview if it serves your live pages. Do not delete it to start the import: deletion can erase its data unless its Preserve settings if plugin is removed option is enabled. Importing saves presets and ID mappings only. Review the cached previews, then choose Switch shortcodes to ShootCal. If Smash Balloon is active, the form requires an explicit choice to deactivate it. The importer preserves its saved data and does not copy credentials or rewrite page content. Undo switch reactivates only the Smash Balloon plugin that this importer deactivated; imported presets remain available. After switching, mapped [instagram-feed feed="12"] shortcodes and the standard Smash Balloon Instagram blocks render through ShootCal. Supported inline overrides are num, cols, nummobile, showfollow, and class. Bare legacy shortcodes without a saved feed ID and unsupported inline options require manual updates. Native Smash Balloon widgets and Elementor widgets must first be replaced with Shortcode blocks/widgets. Network-activated Smash Balloon installations cannot be switched by this site-level importer. This is a migration aid, not full feature or visual parity. ShootCal uses one connected professional account, its own responsive grid and cached recent posts, and exact caption hashtag filters. Word/phrase filters, public hashtag or tagged feeds, multiple-account sources, moderation, shopping, and other unsupported selection settings require an explicitly chosen replacement. Headers, captions, likes, lightboxes, Load More, and custom styles are not copied. The importer scans stored content and widgets; review any theme or external template embeds separately. Clear your page cache and verify affected pages after switching or undoing. I use a performance plugin (Perfmatters, WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, Autoptimize) and the feed looks unstyled or images misbehave. ShootCal Social Feed registers its own exclusions with Perfmatters and WP Rocket automatically: its stylesheet is excluded from Remove Unused CSS, and its images carry the standard skip-lazy marker that most lazy-load plugins honor. After updating this plugin, clear your optimizer's CSS cache once so it regenerates. For other optimizers, exclude these manually: Unused/critical CSS removal: exclude the stylesheet path /shootcal-social-feed/ (or safelist selectors beginning with .shootcal-instagram-feed). Lazy loading: exclude images with the skip-lazy class if your tool does not already honor it. The plugin times its own image loading. JavaScript delay/defer tools: feed.js is small and already deferred; if your tool delays scripts until user interaction, exclude shootcal-social-feed/assets/feed.js so the feed can load on scroll.

No. Filtering is performed locally against captions from the connected account's own recent posts. This keeps permissions and API usage small and predictable.

The last successful cached metadata stays visible. The actual images remain hosted by Meta, and Meta's signed media URLs may eventually expire during a long outage or after access is revoked. An administrator can see the error and retry from ShootCal Apps > Social Feed.

No. Front-end rendering reads only the WordPress cache. Visitors' browsers still load feed images from Meta's CDN, as described under External services.

Open ShootCal Apps > Social Feed and choose Disconnect and clear cache. This removes the encrypted token, selected Instagram account ID, OAuth state, refresh status, and cached feed from this WordPress installation. Deleting the plugin from WordPress also removes all plugin options and its scheduled refresh job. See https://shootcal.com/data-deletion/ for the complete instructions.