Instagram public RSS feed

Question

I was wondering how ink361 was creating an Instagram RSS feed from a username.

Example feed: http://ink361.com/feed/user/snoopdogg

Blog post: http://blog.ink361.com/post/23664609916/new-rss-instagram-feed-feature-on-ink361-com

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Instagram has a publicly accessible RSS API, it's hard to find any information about it, but it works for tags (we do use it).

For tags the syntax is the following:

http://instagr.am/tags/some-tag-you-want-to-follow/feed/recent.rss

I'm not sure whether they have something similar for users' feeds, as I've said it's really hard to find information about it and it may disappear from a day to another in favor of the official API, but right now it works for tags.

Here's an official blog post about it (although it covers only tags): http://blog.instagram.com/post/8755963247/introducing-hashtags-on-instagram

Answer 2

@user2543857 's answer was good. Unfortunately, the structure of the Instagram data has changed. As of the date of posting this, this will work. Copy/paste into a file on your PHP server and use like: yoursite.com/instarss.php?user=name_of_instagram_user This will return valid XML/RSS feed.

EDIT!! Naturally, the output of the page/JSON has changed with instagram's new look/feel. Here is updated code (June, 2015):

<?php

if (!isset($_GET['user'])) {
    exit('Not a valid RSS feed. You didn\'nt provide an Instagram user. Send one via a GET variable. Example .../instarss.php?user=snoopdogg');
}

header('Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8');

$html = file_get_contents('http://instagram.com/'.$_GET['user'].'/');
$html = strstr($html, '{"static_root');
$html = strstr($html, '</script>', true);
//$html = substr($html,0,-6);
$html = substr($html, 0, -1);

$data = json_decode($html);

// print_r($data->entry_data->ProfilePage[0]->user->media->nodes);

$rss_feed = '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><channel>';
$rss_feed .= '<title>'.$_GET['user'].'\'s Instagram Feed</title><atom:link href="http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"].'" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><link>http://instagram.com/'.$_GET['user'].'</link><description>'.$_GET['user'].'\'s Instagram Feed</description>';

foreach($data->entry_data->ProfilePage[0]->user->media->nodes as $node) {

    $rss_feed .= '<item><title>';

    if(isset($node->caption) && $node->caption != '') {
        $rss_feed .= htmlspecialchars($node->caption, ENT_QUOTES, ENT_HTML5);
    } else {
        $rss_feed .= 'photo';
    }

    // pubdate format could also be: "D, d M Y H:i:s T"
    $rss_feed .= '</title><link>https://instagram.com/p/'.$node->code.'/</link><pubDate>'.date("r", $node->date).'</pubDate><dc:creator><![CDATA['.$_GET['user'].']]></dc:creator><description><![CDATA[<img src="'.$node->display_src.'" />]]></description><guid>https://instagram.com/p/'.$node->code.'/</guid></item>';

} // foreach "node" (photo)

$rss_feed .= '</channel></rss>';

echo $rss_feed;
?>

Actually, don't use the above code. I'll try to maintain this Gist in the future.

EDIT December 2016: I'm tired of chasing the every-changing Instagram output only to screen scrape it and have it change a few months later. I'd say just use the API.. If you are still interested in making an RSS feed from a user's page, this Gist should give you an idea of how to do it.