the portrait reel, and the cover you saved

the short version

a wide episode was going to instagram as a landscape reel, with a cover that was not the one you saved. that is fixed.

post to instagram and post to tiktok now send a portrait 9:16 file, 1080 by 1920, even when the episode you filmed is 16:9. the download on the episode page stays the shape you filmed. there is still no re-export button. the portrait version exists so the reel is not letterboxed. a wide episode made from now on has it drawn properly: the same cut laid out again at 9:16, you framed tall, the cards and captions set for a phone, made right after the wide file. an older one, the first time it is posted, has the wide picture fitted onto a blurred background instead, and download the portrait video on the episode page gets you whichever one it has.

the cover on that reel is the portrait one from cards, the tile marked tiktok · instagram, when you have saved it at 1080 by 1920. if you have not, the same recipe is drawn at that size. if there is no picture at all, instagram is pointed at the frame the cover was taken from.

what went out on episode 12

episode 12 was a 1280 by 720 file. the app had a portrait twin only for some podcasts, so the instagram button sent the wide file and instagram fitted it into a reel with bars. the cover it sent was a picture drawn again on the server, not the portrait still from cards. both of those were bugs. a reel is a portrait object. the still in the grid is the first thing anyone sees, and it has to be the still you chose.

the same wide file is what tiktok and a short youtube upload were at risk of using. tiktok's button came back with a 502, which is a server crash with no sentence attached, so the page could not say what to do. the message that only a private account could post is tiktok's own rule, not a fault in your account: approving an app and auditing it for posting in public are two separate steps at tiktok, and until the second one is done, tiktok takes posts from underway only when the account is private. the button now says that in plain words. until then, download the portrait video and post it yourself.

what each button sends now

instagram gets the portrait file and the saved portrait cover, as a reel. the link instagram uses to fetch the file lasts two hours, because instagram fetches on its own clock and an hour can run out. the connection itself is a sixty-day token. it is refreshed while it still has a week left, and again by a daily job while ten days remain, because an expired instagram token cannot be refreshed at all. if the long-lived exchange fails at connect time, the one-hour token is not saved as if it were the sixty-day one.

tiktok gets the same portrait file, in the chunks tiktok's upload rules allow. a file under 64 megabytes goes in one piece. a larger one is split so the last piece is never a scrap under five megabytes, which is what tiktok refuses. before the upload, the app asks tiktok again who this account may post to, and it will not send an audience you did not choose or one the account does not offer. the picker starts on choose who can see it. nothing is pre-selected. if the account can only post as only me, the sheet says so and offers reconnect. a failure comes back as a sentence, including when the upload itself is refused, instead of a bare 502.

youtube uses the episode's name as the title. the old title put the episode number in front of it, which is a label, not what someone would search. an episode of three minutes or under goes up portrait, as a short, with #shorts in the description. youtube does not take a custom thumbnail on a short, and the page says so, on the web and the phone. set one in the youtube app if you need it on the short. a longer episode goes up in the shape it was filmed, and the wide cover is set as the thumbnail when the channel can take one. a channel needs a verified phone number before youtube will accept a custom thumbnail. the line under view on youtube says whether it took.

x was refusing to refresh with unauthorized_client. a confidential app has to send its id and secret as http basic auth on the token call and on the refresh, with the client id in the body as well. an empty secret, or a secret from a different app than the one that issued the stored token, is what x answers with that code. the button now says so and offers reconnect. the video that goes with the thread is a post, up to twenty minutes, which is x's limit for that kind of upload. if the connection is missing permission to post or to upload, reconnect and accept both.

linkedin stays a personal post. the file it sends is the one you filmed, wide when the episode is wide, and the cover is in that shape. the app waits until linkedin has finished with the video before it publishes, and it says so if the video never becomes available. a company page is not a button. there is nothing to press for one.

what you do

on cards, look at the portrait tile. if the episode is wide, that tile is drawn for tiktok and instagram and filed beside the wide cover. save it once. the next post to instagram uses that file, not a redraw that happens to look similar.

then post from the share tab, the same buttons as before: post to instagram, post to tiktok, post to youtube, post to linkedin, post to x, and post everywhere when more than one is connected. tiktok still asks who can see it, every time. x still shows the thread and waits. nothing posts on its own.

if a button says reconnect, press it. that is the connection, not the episode. a tiktok or x connection made before the app credentials on the server were corrected has to be made again, because the stored token belongs to the old client. instagram connections that are still inside their sixty days are refreshed for you.

the phone does the same post. the same portrait file, the same episode name on youtube, the same note when a short cannot take the cover, and the same reconnect when the token is the problem. download today's episode is still the file you filmed.

faqs