Getting instagram post url from media id

Question

I have the post media_id in my hands and I'd like to know if there is a way to create a valid url from it.

For instance, if you have a Facebook post id (xxxx_yyyy) on your hands, you can create the following url from it (http://facebook.com/xxxx/posts/yyyy) and directly access the original post.

Is there a way to do this on Instagram? Having media_id (and user_id) in my hands, is it possible to create a single post url?

Answer 1

I had to implement client side javascript to solve this and Seano's answer was invaluable and I was glad they mentioned the use of the BigInteger library however I wanted to provide a complete implementation using the BigInteger library which as it turns out is quite necessary.

I downloaded the BigInteger lib from https://www.npmjs.com/package/big-integer.

Here is the function which works well for me.

function getInstagramUrlFromMediaId(media_id) {
    var alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-_';
    var shortenedId = '';
    media_id = media_id.substring(0, media_id.indexOf('_'));

    while (media_id > 0) {
        var remainder = bigInt(media_id).mod(64);
        media_id = bigInt(media_id).minus(remainder).divide(64).toString();
        shortenedId = alphabet.charAt(remainder) + shortenedId;
    }

    return 'https://www.instagram.com/p/' + shortenedId + '/';
}

I just want to point out that the usage of toString() when assigning the re-calculated media_id is very important, the value remains a string to ensure the entire number is used (in my case the media_id was 19 characters long). The BigInteger documentation also states this...

Note that Javascript numbers larger than 9007199254740992 and smaller than -9007199254740992 are not precisely represented numbers and will not produce exact results. If you are dealing with numbers outside that range, it is better to pass in strings.

Cheers!