How to get the real HQ image from the Instagram API?

Question

Firstly, there are already questions to this topic, but none cover up my problem, entirely, because it's either not the data I need or it's not working properly.

There are services like InstaDP that are able to show you the HQ version of any profile picture from Instagram. Now, I wonder how this is possible?

I did some research and were able to find a higher quality URL when accessing https://www.instagram.com/instagramforbusiness/?__a=1 (see profile_pic_url_hd, answered here). However, InstaDP seems to have a backend that returns a different url that redirects to a way higher quality image: https://instadp-cors-222621.appspot.com/get-hd?id=1107766105 (see at hd_profile_pic_url_info, I extracted the ID for the URL from the result of the ?__a=1 link). I tested this with my personal profile and was able to get the image of myself in an outstanding quality of 1024x1024. However, the ?__a=1 link seem only to return a link for my profile picture in 320x320.

Since InstaDP seem to not be the only player who is able to fetch HQ profile pictures I went ahead and compared the backends of those players. It seems that each service seem to have a different URL to the HQ profile picture of the same Instagram account. So my conclusion is that the Instagram API is involved in all that.

So I created a client key at https://www.instagram.com/developer/. I was also able to get my auth token and determine my logged in csrftoken for the X-CSRFToken header. Now my question is how to continue?

I found a few answers to this topic stating I should request https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/1107766105/info/, but it always returns the login page as HTML.

I tried a REST client that uses my Chrome cookies and logged into Instagram before, I tried to set my HTTP headers to X-CSRFToken:<mycookietoken> and Content-Type:application/json. (If I don't set the CSRFToken it errors, so I need to add it, but if the header is set I get the HTML again, even when the CSRFToken is correct. I don't get an error when the CSRFToken is wrong.)

I also tried setting the Origin, Referer and Host to trick Instagram in believing the request came from its own window location, without luck. Setting the Host will even cause a 400 bad request. Even adding my access token in the URL had no effect (?access-token=########).

To sum my question up, how do those services obtain the profile pictures in a such a great quality of up to 1024x1024 from the cdninstagram servers?

Solution 1

Although I am late, but this might be of someone's help:

Step 1: First thing you need to get HD Instagram profile picture is their profile ID. This can be found in the source code of user profile link. For example if you view source of the following link https://www.instagram.com/abdulhaq0/ and search for "logging_page_id" you will get "profilePage_1285389476". The numbers following the profilePage are the ID for this account.

Step 2: Next you need put ID in the following URL https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/{ProfileID}/info/ and open it in browser. In our case link would be https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/1285389476/info/

Step 3: Now on the link above search for "hd_profile_pic_url_info". There you can get the URL of HD Instagram profile picture.

Hope this helped.

Solution 2

Steps: 1. Get the instagram post link. Eg : https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo-Jru-g7Wa/

or if you don't have the link, the instagram api provides you with a permalink option in the result array which for the above link is Bo-Jru-g7Wa

2. Now just follow add media?size=l after the url ie.,

Result: High quality image url:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo-Jru-g7Wa/media?size=l

you can see it in action here: https://jsfiddle.net/nmj1z7wo/fiddle URL

This link can be considered as a shorthand code to instagram image URL's which are very much bigger

Solution 3

I believe those sites like https://instadp.site/ that show the hi-res of the user profile image do not use the official Instagram API.

In the past it was possible to hack Instagram's CDN URLs to change parameters and get the high resolution from them, but nowadays the URLs are signed and if you change any parameters the URL will fail.

So, the only solution they may be using is to emulate a client. There is a popular PHP client for this: https://github.com/mgp25/Instagram-API

Comments

[Martin Braun]

Sorry, you misunderstood my question. I don't want the HQ image from a post, I want the HQ image of a profile picture.

[Vinay Sharma]

As you stated that such sites do not use official Instagram API, how do they manage to find and get access to Instagram's unofficial APIs?