Where do I find the Instagram media ID of a image

Question

I\'m am looking for the MediaID of an Instagram image which has been uploaded. It should look like

1234567894561231236_33215652

Answer 1

You can actually derive the MediaId from the last segment of the link algorithmically using a method I wrote about here: http://carrot.is/coding/instagram-ids. It works by mapping the URL segment by character codes & converting the id into a base 64 number.

For example, given the link you mentioned (http://instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL), we get the last segment (Y7GF-5vftL) then we map it into character codes using the base64 url-safe alphabet (24:59:6:5:62:57:47:31:45:11_64). Next, we convert this base64 number into base10 (448979387270691659).

If you append your userId after an _ you get the full id in the form you specified, but since the MediaId is unique without the userId you can actually omit the userId from most requests.

Finally, I made a Node.js module called instagram-id-to-url-segment to automate this conversion:

convert = require('instagram-id-to-url-segment');
instagramIdToUrlSegment = convert.instagramIdToUrlSegment;
urlSegmentToInstagramId = convert.urlSegmentToInstagramId;

instagramIdToUrlSegment('448979387270691659'); // Y7GF-5vftL
urlSegmentToInstagramId('Y7GF-5vftL'); // 448979387270691659

Answer 2

So the most up-voted "Better Way" is a little deprecated so here is my edit and other solutions:

Javascript + jQuery

$.ajax({
    type: 'GET',
    url: 'http://api.instagram.com/oembed?callback=&url='+Url, //You must define 'Url' for yourself
    cache: false,
    dataType: 'json',
    jsonp: false,
    success: function (data) {
       var MediaID = data.media_id;
   }
});

PHP

$your_url = "" //Input your url
$api = file_get_contents("http://api.instagram.com/oembed?callback=&url=" . your_url);      
$media_id = json_decode($api,true)['media_id'];

So, this is just an updated version of @George's code and is currently working. However, I made other solutions, and some even avoid an ajax request:

---

Shortcode Ajax Solution

Certain Instagram urls use a shortened url syntax. This allows the client to just use the shortcode in place of the media id if requested properly.

An example shortcode url looks like this: https://www.instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL/

The Y7GF-5vftL is your shortcode for the picture.

Using Regexp:

var url = "https://www.instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL/"; //Define this yourself
var Key = /p\/(.*?)\/$/.exec(url)[1];

In the same scope, Key will contain your shortcode. Now to request, let's say, a low res picture using this shortcode, you would do something like the following:

    $.ajax({
        type: "GET",
        dataType: "json",
        url: "https://api.instagram.com/v1/media/shortcode/" + Key + "?access_token=" + access_token, //Define your 'access_token'
        success: function (RawData) {
            var LowResURL = RawData.data.images.low_resolution.url;
        }
    });

There is lots of other useful information, including the media id, in the returned RawData structure. Log it or look up the api documentation to see.

---

Shortcode Conversion Solution

You can actually convert your shortcode to the id fairly easily! Here's a simple way to do it in javascript:

function shortcodeToInstaID(Shortcode) {
      var char;
      var id = 0;
      var alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-_';
      for (var i = 0; i < Shortcode.length; i++) {
          char = Shortcode[i];
          id = (id * 64) + alphabet.indexOf(char);
      }
      return id;
  }

Note: If you want a more robust node.js solution, or want to see how you would convert it back, check out @Slang's module on npm.

---

Full Page Solution

So what if you have the URL to a full Instagram page like: https://www.instagram.com/p/BAYYJBwi0Tssh605CJP2bmSuRpm_Jt7V_S8q9A0/

Well, you can actually read the HTML to find a meta property that contains the Media ID. There are also a couple other algorithms you can perform on the URL itself to get it, but I believe that requires too much effort so we will keep it simple. Either query the meta tag al:ios:url or iterate through the html. Since reading metatags is posted all over, I'll show you how to iterate.

NOTE: This is a little unstable and is vulnerable to being patched. This method does NOT work on a page that uses a preview box. So if you give it the current HTML when you click on a picture in someone's profile, this WILL break and return a bad Media ID.

function getMediaId(HTML_String) {
  var MediaID = "";
  var e = HTML_String.indexOf("al:ios:url") + 42; //HTML_String is a variable that contains all of the HTML text as a string for the current document. There are many different ways to retrieve this so look one up. 
  for (var i = e; i <= e + 100; i++) { //100 should never come close to being reached
      if (request.source.charAt(i) == "\"")
         break;
      MediaID += request.source.charAt(i);
  }
  return MediaID;
}

---

And there you go, a bunch of different ways to use Instagram's api to get a Media ID. Hope one fixes your struggles.

Answer 3

Your media ID is: 448979387270691659_45818965 This is how to get it.

1. Go to instgram.com/username.
2. Click the photo you want the id of.
3. (Chrome instructions) right click on the photo (should be a popup image)
4. Inspect element
5. Search through the selected text, you should see something like this photo448979387270691659_45818965

There should be your photo ID.

For some reason, this only seems to work with the popup, and not the actual image URL.

Answer 4

You can use the shortcode media API from instagram. If you use php you can use the following code to get the shortcode from the image's URL:

$matches = [];

preg_match('/instagram\.com\/p\/([^\/]*)/i', $url, $matches);

if (count($matches) > 1) {
    $shortcode = $matches[1];
}

Then send a request to the API using your access token (Replace ACCESS-TOKEN with your token)

$apiUrl = sprintf("https://api.instagram.com/v1/media/shortcode/%s?access_token=ACCESS-TOKEN", $shortcode);

Answer 5

Here is python solution to do this without api call.

def media_id_to_code(media_id):
    alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-_'
    short_code = ''
    while media_id > 0:
        remainder = media_id % 64
        media_id = (media_id-remainder)/64
        short_code = alphabet[remainder] + short_code
    return short_code


def code_to_media_id(short_code):
    alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-_'
    media_id = 0;
    for letter in short_code:
        media_id = (media_id*64) + alphabet.index(letter)

    return media_id

Answer 6

Same thing you can implement in Python-

import requests,json

def get_media_id(media_url):
   url = 'https://api.instagram.com/oembed/?callback=&url=' + media_url
   response = requests.get(url).json()
   print(response['media_id'])

get_media_id('MEDIA_URL')