Using the discontinued Instagram REST API, I developed the first photo printing system for Instagram in Brazil, Printgram. It was an idea of the great photographer and entrepreneur, Bruno Bezerra. The service was sold for thousands of events in Brazil between 2012 and 2019 and the system was the core of the process.
I made it in vanilla PHP, following my previous experience as a developer with ASP on the most relevant newspaper website in Brazil, O Globo. And during 3 years, we improved the system to meet the requirements of different clients. The first version of the system had its main feature working directly on the browser, by mounting each photo on a `<canvas>` tag through JavaScript and adding and positioning all the assets needed, like the sponsor name, the username, the date, and some other metadata.
It worked that way for some years, but it was not a great solution because as the service grew, the system started to get slow. So we decided to revamp it and, instead of mounting each photo, we started to mount only one photo to print, replacing it with all the needed details every time we selected a different IG photo.
