Instagram's public RSS stopped working

Question

My application uses Instagram's publicly accessible RSS API to get images with certain hashtags, i.e. where the syntax is the following:

http://instagram.com/tags/some-tag-you-want-to-follow/feed/recent.rss

But since Sept. 29, my application hasn't been receiving any data. When I point my browser at the URL, it gives me Instagram's 404 error. Try it on any feed:

http://instagram.com/tags/cats/feed/recent.rss

http://instagram.com/tags/food/feed/recent.rss

Is anyone else having this problem?

Solution 1

Same problem. Looks like Instagram ditched their .rss feed. Now using http://widget.websta.me/rss/tag/inserthashtaghere this

Solution 2

I also recommend Iconosquare (formerly Instagram) also provides RSS feeds.

http://iconosquare.com/feed/username
http://iconosquare.com/tagFeed/hashtag

The web interface is slightly less clunky than webstagram plus the stats are nice.

Solution 3

I found this because I was trying to set up a feed for Instagram as they suggest here (although the domain is "instagr.am" instead of "instagram.com"...

http://blog.instagram.com/post/8755963247/introducing-hashtags-on-instagram

• and also in this article on doing an Instagram contest...

https://help.instagram.com/464700830247492/

The failure to work would not be due to the "tags" user since that person has been active well before the date of disappearance. It would appear to have been deprecated because it's not the type of thing to get "buggy" and (if it was) it would have long been de-bugged quickly.

What's odd is that if they had deprecated it, one would think they would have announced the intention, as Twitter did. Given that this is the only results (dated after Oct 1 2014) that turns up when searching for [instagram rss feed not working] at Google, it would appear not to have been used very much. ;-)

Still, Instagram could at least update their Web pages, if the goal was to just slide this by everyone (Twitter made "it's the end of RSS" news when they announced "no more RSS"). For social businesses, they sure do like their closed walls, don't they.

The suggestions above work well. I'll look at the API or perhaps use feed43.com, which pulls directly off any page that changes rapidly and has predictably patterned formatting (works well, although the feed will break every once or twice a year when a site changes its formatting - easy enough to fix).

Hope this helps the next person wondering.

P.S. I spoke too quickly. I dug deeper after posting. There a couple of other pages lower down in the SERPs about RSS not working. It seems to have started on Sept 29. No official answers that I could find, though.

Solution 4

Just a guess, but it looks like someone set up a user account called tags and got the url http://instagram.com/tags/ for their own account. That would knock the rss right out.

Solution 5

Since this post has gotten a lot of views, I'll mention another solution: Instagram's public JSON APIs, which is actually what that app is currently using. You just pass __a=1 as a GET parameter to any URL on https://instagram.com. So if anyone else was just using RSS to scrape data from Instagram, this JSON API is a really nice alternative to XML.

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Comments

[peetsnack]

I am seeing the same thing. I cannot find any info on if this is intentional or when/why it was implemented.

[endolith]

@peetsnack Lots of sites have removed RSS feeds, probably because it lets you view their content without viewing their ads/tracking your activity/things that make them money?

[jpsimard-nyx]

Tool seems no longer available. Business model probably changed to a social media manager for the account owner

[iokevins]

"...due to Instagram's data usage policy (on April 4th), our service is no longer useful as it used to be to our subscribers, thus we decided to stop our WEBSTA service soon." (posted 04/04/2018; accessed 04/12/2018) -- websta.me/about