How To: Instagram API + Fancybox Simplified

api / development / instagram / photos Posted on Jun 12, 2012 by Nick Rivers

So the last tutorial I posted demonstrated how to render Foursquare checkins on a google map. In this tutorial, I will demonstrate how to display your Instagram photos on your blog or website. Coincidentally, at its core Instagram uses Foursquare's API for associating "venues" with a photo. For example, users can filter photos that were taken at the Eiffel Tower. Click here to download the source files including the javascript and php used to create the product.

Authentication

The first thing we need is an access token. Instagram uses OAuth 2.0 protocol for simple, but effective authentication. I could tell you how to retrieve access tokens but then I'd have to kill you (And everything I've done is documented on Instagram's Developer page). Instead, to make your lives easier, I've provided an easy way for you to attain your access token and user id. Click here to retrieve your access token and user ID.

Instagram has a 5000 request per hour rate limit. This is high in comparison to twitter and similar services so bundling requests to avoid the hitting the limit may not be necessary unless you have high volumes of traffic.

Retrieve Images

Now we are ready to get our images. See the code below to make this happen. In our example, we are using PHP's CURL library to make our requests.

<?php
  function fetchData($url){
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 20);
    $result = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);
    return $result;
  }
  $result = fetchData("https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/ID-GOES-HERE/media/recent/?access_token=TOKEN-GOES-HERE");
  $result = json_decode($result);
  foreach ($result->data as $post) {
    // Do something with this data.
  }
?>