How to access Instagram Basic Display API without user login?

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I am developing a website which would facilitate an end user to see an Instagram user's media such as Profile Pictures, Posts and Stories with the Instagram Basic Display API.

As per the documentation of the API, an Authorization Window needs to be implemented to get Authorization Codes and permissions from app users. Authorization Codes need to be exchanged for Instagram User Access Tokens, which must be included when querying an app user's profile or their media.

Bu there are numerous services which are able to show an Instagram user's media without having to implement the complex pipeline above:

  1. InstaDP
  2. FullInstaDP
  3. InstaFinsta
  4. IZoomYou
  5. InstaDownloader

So, how are these services even able to bypass the Authorization Window and provide a seamless user experience without the end user's login? Especially how is InstaDP able to display reels and InstaDP which are not even support yet in the API?

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It's way more sophisticated & costly than official Basic Display API. They are using Instagram private APIs. They use multiple accounts (by its cookies) to fetch those data from Instagram, e.g. for fetching user info, they call endpoints like https://www.instagram.com/washingtonpost/?__a=1. You can open your browser's developer tools to see the endpoints Instagram calls to fetch the details.

By sophistication, I meant

  • The services that you have mentioned need to emulate human behavior while scraping data from Instagram otherwise Instagram would block those "fake accounts" and it's extremely hard to create accounts in Instagram via automation, you cannot create bulk accounts.
  • They use residential proxies, and they pay for it.

If you do not want to go all those hassles, you can buy Instagram private APIs but it's not cheap.

Here are some open source projects that might interest you