Question

I’m writing a java program that goes out and searches twitter, finds certain instagram links, and then downloads the instagram image to a directory. I’ve written all of the code to do the twitter searching and image saving but the problem that I’m having is that I get a URL in the following format

http://t.co/xxxxxxxx

From the twitter search which then if followed resolves to an instagram URL such as

http://instagr.am/p/xxxxxxxxxx/

How can I go about resolving the original URL to the instagram URL and then downloading the appropriate image on that page?

Answer 1

Instagram provides an API call for this. It returns everything you would need in JSON format just provide the short URL like:

http://api.instagram.com/oembed?url=http://instagr.am/p/XXXXXX/

And you’ll get the data like this:

{
    provider_url: "http://instagr.am/",
    title: "Rays",
    url: "http://distillery.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2010/10/02/7e4051fdcf1d45ab9bc1fba2582c0c6b_7.jpg",
    author_name: "danrubin",
    media_id: "5382_72",
    author_id: 72,
    height: 612,
    width: 612,
    version: "1.0",
    author_url: "http://instagr.am/",
    provider_name: "Instagram",
    type: "photo"
}

Or if all you want is the image you can just add a /media to the URL:

http://instagr.am/p/XXXXXX/media