instagram image doesn't load/show in opera mini

Question

I am having an issue where an image URL that I get from Instagram API isn't showing up the image on Opera Mini browsers and it works perfectly fine on Android Browser or Safari.

Here's the image. I am not sure what the issue is here, but by looking at the URL it seems that the image is hosted using amazons3 and there might be some caching mechanism in it that opera isn't handling well. What are the workaround with these? I simply can't drop opera mini support as 50% of my site's traffic is coming from there. The best way to test this is by downloading Opera Mini on your devices (i was trying the simulator provided at the site here, but it didn't work)

Another example try opening this instagram user profile from opera mini. You can see that most of the images doesn't load up.

Answer 1

Instagram render images using javascript. If you will open console in opera mini:

server:console?post=http://instagram.com/shoptastus

you will get javascript errors. So images aren't loaded because javascript on page is broken.

P.S. You can get all javascript errors using server:console?post=url in opera mini :)

Answer 2

I've tested the image and it doesn't show up on my phone too, even after changing all available settings on Opera Mini.

Excerpt from the Opera Mini FAQ Page:

Opera Mini uses a transcoder server to translate HTML/CSS/JavaScript into a more compact format. It will also shrink any images to fit the screen of your handset. This translation step makes Opera Mini fast, small, and also very cheap to use.

My guess is that Opera mini fails while trans-coding certain type of images. I've tested other images, such as png, jpg and gif and they all display correctly.

After collecting more info about instagram images I've found out that their JFIF properties is:

JFIF Version    1.01
Resolution  1 pixels/None

If I convert the same image on photoshop Opera mini displays it correctly.
Based on this, I can assume that the problem isn't related with cache or amazonaws, it's in the relation between opera mini and images with JFIF Resolution 1 pixels/None

I'm afraid I don't have a solution for you besides filling a bug report on the Opera Mini bug report page: https://mini.bugs.opera.com/
I'm sure they'll look at it and it's your best chance to get this fixed asap.

You can also try posting on the opera community forum:
http://forums.opera.com/categories/en-opera-mini

Best of luck.