Instagram Basic Display - How do I get USER ID?

Question

I have the Instagram basic Display api set up and working ok to get my data. However if I try to get a user data (not mine), non of the ids work.

Here is how am searching in python code but its failing:

media = instagram_basic_display.get_user_media(user_id='nnnnn')

If I insert the user is from the url, it doesn't work.

What is the correct user_id to use in the above code in place of 'nnnnn'?

Answer 1

In Basic Display API overview it says:

The API can be used to access any type of Instagram account but only provides read-access to basic data. If you are building an app that will allow Instagram Businesses or Creators to publish media, moderate comments, identify @mentioned and hashtagged media, or get data about other Instagram users, use the Instagram Graph API instead.

So you may need to look into Instagram Graph API instead.

Here are a couple great resources:

• https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/getting-started

• https://levelup.gitconnected.com/automating-instagram-posts-with-python-and-instagram-graph-api-374f084b9f2b

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8i4CaELPME

• https://github.com/imakashsahu/Instagram-Graph-API-Python

Instabot is also a terrific library. To install it, simply run pip install instabot. To get the users id and username, you can do this:

from instabot import Bot
bot = Bot()

user_id = bot.get_user_id_from_username("yourusername")
username = bot.get_username_from_user_id(user_id)
print(f"Welcome {username} your userid is {user_id}")

In conclusion, you cannot currently use Basic Display API to access a user name or id. Instead, you can use Instagram Graph API, or a useful instabot library.