Generate access token Instagram API, without having to log in?

Question

So I am building a restaurant app and one of the features I want is to allow a user of the app to see photos from a particular restaurant's Instagram account. And I want a user to be able to see this without having to login to their Instagram account, so they shouldn't even need an Instagram account for this to work.

So I have read this answer How can I get a user's media from Instagram without authenticating as a user?

And I tried what it said and used the client_id(which I recieved when I registered my app using my personal Instagram account), but I still get an error back saying :

{
    meta: {
          error_type: "OAuthAccessTokenException",
          code: 400,
          error_message: "The access_token provided is invalid."
     }
}

The endpoint I am trying to hit is :

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q=[USERNAME]&client_id=[CLIENT ID]

So do I absolutely need an access token for this to work(and thus have to enforce a user to log in) ?

If I do, then is there way to generate an access token somehow without forcing the user log in?

I believe there is a way around this, as the popular dating app Tinder has this desired functionality I am looking for, as it allows you to see photos from people's Instagram account without having to log in! (I have just verified this 5 minutes ago!)

Any help on this would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Edit April 2018: After facebook privacy case this endpoint is immediately put out of service. It seems we need to parse the JSON embedded in <script> tag directly within the profile page:

<script type="text/javascript">window._sharedData = {"activity_counts":...

Any better ideas are welcome.

---

You can use the most recent link

GET https://www.instagram.com/{username}/?__a=1

to get latest 20 posts in JSON format. Hope you put this to good use.

---

edit: other ways aren't valid anymore: https://www.instagram.com/{username}/media/