How to set a custom profile photo and bio text

Important

By late 2024, Meta will phase out its Instagram Basic Display API, meaning Instagram will no longer allow personal accounts to be used in Spotlight. Learn more about this change.

Instagram does not provide a profile photo and bio text for Personal accounts. 

Since we believe that this shouldn't limit the use of Spotlight's features, you can upload your own photo and add a custom bio in Spotlight itself to match your Instagram profile. 

Account-level

At the account level, found by going to Spotlight > Settings > Accounts and clicking on the account name or the info icon button, you can set up a custom bio and profile photo for the account. This will apply to all feeds where the account is used, but it can also be overridden per feed (see below).

When connecting a Personal account for the first time you will also see a prompt to set up these custom details which looks like this:

You can click on "No" and do this later as explained above. If you click "Yes", it proceeds to the Account details modal as seen below:

From here, use the Change profile picture and Edit bio options to create your custom profile. This can be made to match your Instagram account or can be something completely different just for your site.

Note: The custom bio and profile photo applied in Spotlight do not have any effect on those used in your official Instagram account. They will not override your Instagram account's details. The custom bio and profile photo will only appear in Spotlight feeds on your website.

Here's a look at the Account details modal with custom details set up to be used only in Spotlight feeds:

Feed-level

When creating or editing a feed, you have the option to override the original bio and profile photo, as well as the custom ones set in the Spotlight account, for just that feed. 

This can be useful when creating feeds to, for example, display posts featuring a particular product or location. You can change the profile details to match the feed's topic to make it look more consistent.

These feed-level custom bio options can be set in the Header options of the Design step.

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