The Recipe Is in the Comments: Capturing Instagram Pinned & Creator Comments

You've done this. A reel shows a 30-second recipe, it looks incredible, and the caption says some version of "full recipe pinned below 👇". The voiceover never lists the quantities. The caption is three emojis and a hook. The thing you actually came for — the ingredient list, the temperatures, the link — is sitting in a pinned comment.

Transcribe that reel and you get the spoken words, which is genuinely useful. But you don't get the recipe, because the recipe was never spoken. It was typed, once, into a comment. So ReelScribe now grabs that too.

Why the caption isn't the whole story

Instagram quietly trained creators to move their best content into the comments. Three forces push it there:

• Caption fatigue. A wall of text under a reel kills the scroll. Creators keep the caption to a hook and a CTA, and dump the substance into a comment.
• The engagement loop. "Recipe's in the comments" sends viewers tapping into the comment thread. More comment views, more time-on-post — signals Instagram rewards with reach.
• Pinning. Instagram lets a creator pin up to three comments to the top. That's the perfect home for the recipe, the ingredient breakdown, the discount code, or the "here's the actual link" reply — guaranteed to sit above everyone else's.

The upshot: for recipe accounts, tutorials, product reviews, and "link in comments" posts, the spoken audio is the trailer and the pinned comment is the movie. A transcript alone captures the trailer.

What ReelScribe now captures

With the option enabled, every Instagram reel you transcribe comes back with its comments attached. Each one is tagged so the useful ones surface immediately:

• Pinned comments first. The comments the creator pinned to the top sort to the front of the list, marked with a 📌. This is where the recipe usually is.
• Creator comments flagged. When the comment author is the post's owner, it's marked as a creator comment — so when someone answers "recipe?" in a reply instead of pinning it, you still catch it.
• Top comments for context. The rest of the page rounds out the picture — corrections, substitutions, and the questions other viewers actually asked.

Everything lands in the same place as the transcript, caption, hashtags, and mentions you already get. One copy button lifts the whole comment block out.

How to turn it on

1. Paste an Instagram reel URL into ReelScribe.
2. A checkbox appears: "Include pinned & creator comments." Tick it.
3. Submit. You get the transcript plus the comments, pinned-first, in your dashboard.

The checkbox only shows for Instagram URLs — it's specific to how Instagram surfaces pinned and creator comments. Leave it unticked and transcription behaves exactly as before. There's no separate charge: it's part of the same single-credit job, and you only ever spend that one credit whether the post has a pinned recipe or no comments at all.

Who this is actually for

• Recipe collectors. Save the reel and the ingredient list in one step, fully searchable in your library instead of screenshotted in your camera roll.
• Marketers and researchers. The pinned comment is often where the product link, the promo code, or the "use code X" lives. Now it's captured with the script.
• Creators studying creators. See how a post you're modeling handles its CTA — what they pin, how they answer the most-asked question, what the top comments push back on.
• Anyone repurposing video. If you're turning reels into blog posts or newsletters, the comment thread is free source material — real questions to answer, real objections to address.

A real example

Take a reel walking through an AI tool. The voiceover is all energy and no specifics. The first comment, pinned by the creator, reads: "📌 Review the 'Use it safely' docs before you try this — link here." That single line is the most useful thing on the entire post, and a plain transcript would miss it completely. With comments on, it's the first thing in your results, flagged as both pinned and from the creator.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the recipe in the comments and not the caption?

Instagram caps captions and rewards engagement, so creators park the long stuff — the full recipe, the ingredient list, the links — in a pinned comment. It keeps the caption short and nudges viewers into the comment thread, which Instagram reads as a positive signal.

Does pulling comments cost extra credits?

No. It's included in the same one-credit transcription. If a post has comments disabled or none exist, you just get the transcript — no comments, no penalty.

Is this available for TikTok and YouTube?

Not yet — comment extraction is Instagram-only for now. TikTok and YouTube transcription work as they always have.

What if the creator didn't pin anything?

You still get the top comments and any the creator wrote, flagged as creator comments — which catches the cases where they answered "recipe?" in a reply instead of pinning it.

Also see: How to transcribe Instagram reels · Instagram script extractor · Content repurposing workflow · Instagram transcription