Question

I subscribed to the #tattoo tag with instagram’s real-time api and it’s working fine, the problem is that I have no idea how to get the actual uploaded image when the post data looks like this:

[{"changed_aspect": "media", "subscription_id": XXXXXX, "object": "tag", "object_i
d": "tattoo", "time": 1334521880}]

It doesn’t give me any info about the media_id or something like that, am I missing something?

Answer 1

As noted in their realtime API docs:

The changed data is not included in the payload, so it is up to you how you’d like to fetch the new data. For example, you may decide only to fetch new data for specific users, or after a certain number of photos have been posted.

So it sounds like you just have to get the actual data via their regular tag API, apparently using GET /tags/{tag-name}/media/recent. For you:

https://api.instagram.com/v1/tags/tattoo/media/recent?access_token=ACCESS-TOKEN

This does certainly seem inelegant, since you’ll have to sort out which of the recent updates you’ve already seen, but I don’t see anything suggesting a better method.