How To Search Instagram via API Query?

Question

I would like to build a small 'instant image search' app powered by Instagram photos. This would be like Google Instant where you start typing and results are displayed/updated as you type more letters.

You can see a live demo app powered by Google Images instead. I know this is possible with larger engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing) but I have no idea if Instagram will allow this. Can anybody familiar with the API offer help on this?

If it's not possible to search via the API that makes sense. I just wanted to check here first since there are so many knowledgeable programmers.

Solution 1

First of all, and in case you didn't knew, there's already one similar (at least) web app. That being said, let's go to the answer:

You need to get your client_id, since you need it to call the API (More info here). You should be making calls to this endpoint (More info about Instagram's API endpoints here, you should read this :P):

https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/SEARCH-TAG/media/recent?client_id=CLIENT-ID&callback=YOUR-CALLBACK

Of course, change the SEARCH-TAG with user input, CLIENT-ID with the one you got before and YOUR-CALLBACK with your callback function's name.

The response to this call comes in JSONP and looks like this (Taken from the API's page):

{
    "data": [{
        "type": "image",
        "filter": "Earlybird",
        "tags": ["snow"],
        "comments": {
            "data": [{
                "created_time": "1296703540",
                "text": "Snow",
                "from": {
                    "username": "emohatch",
                    "username": "Dave",
                    "id": "1242695"
                },
                "id": "26589964"
            },
            {
                "created_time": "1296707889",
                "text": "#snow",
                "from": {
                    "username": "emohatch",
                    "username": "Emo Hatch",
                    "id": "1242695"
                },
                "id": "26609649"
            }],
            "count": 3
        }
        "caption": {
            "created_time": "1296703540",
            "text": "#Snow",
            "from": {
                "username": "emohatch",
                "id": "1242695"
            },
            "id": "26589964"
        },
        "likes": {
            "count": 1,
            "data": [{
                "username": "mikeyk",
                "full_name": "Mike Krieger",
                "id": "4",
                "profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_1242695_75sq_1293915800.jpg"
            }]
        },        
        "link": "http://instagr.am/p/BWl6P/",
        "user": {
            "username": "emohatch",
            "profile_picture": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/profiles/profile_1242695_75sq_1293915800.jpg",
            "id": "1242695",
            "full_name": "Dave"
        },
        "created_time": "1296703536",
        "images": {
            "low_resolution": {
                "url": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2011/02/02/f9443f3443484c40b4792fa7c76214d5_6.jpg",
                "width": 306,
                "height": 306
            },
            "thumbnail": {
                "url": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2011/02/02/f9443f3443484c40b4792fa7c76214d5_5.jpg",
                "width": 150,
                "height": 150
            },
            "standard_resolution": {
                "url": "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2011/02/02/f9443f3443484c40b4792fa7c76214d5_7.jpg",
                "width": 612,
                "height": 612
            }
        },
        "id": "22699663",
        "location": null
    },
    ...
    ]
}

Then you just need to process this response and do whatever you want with it :)

Solution 2

An important side note: instagram allows max 5000 queries for hour. This if you use the query with the app id. If you want to raise this limit, you can ask your users to authenticate. Then you can pass the the user access token. Hope this helps

Comments

[Jake]

Wow this is an incredibly detailed response thank you! I don't have time right now to go over the code, but you linked me to a working example which is perfect. Just for a quick questions when replacing the SEARCH-TAG how would I add the user input? Would this just be URI encoded first so that a search for "baby puppy" turns into "baby+puppy"?

[scumah]

@JakeRocheleau, I made some tests and it seems like the API doesn't accepts more than one tag. I then searched for it and, in fact, the API is limited to one tag per request (link, link) :/ Something like "baby+puppy" or "baby%20puppy" would return just nothing. So, in order to support multiple tagging in your app, you may need to split the user input and make several requests, which is a bit harder. Good luck with it :)

[user83039]

Why would you want to lower the limit?

[kinduff]

@user83039 If you don't need more queries per hour, if your application doesn't need more.

[igneosaur]

As an update: this same endpoint now required an ACCESS_TOKEN to query instagram.com/developer/endpoints/tags