Link to Instagram profile with user ID

Question

I want to link to a profile/user account on Instagram. I have the user ID, but the I can't find the answer in the developer API documentation. I've tried instagram.com/userID and instagram.com/users/userID but these aren't working. Simple question: I have just a single <a> tag and I want to know what goes in the href to take the user to a specific instagram profile. Or possibly a window.location in javascript.

Or if there's a way to get the username from the ID, I suppose I could also do it in that round-a-bout way...

Answer 1

I am not aware of a solution, that makes it work as a simple link.

You will need to use the Instagram API and sign up your application so that you have a Client-ID.

Next, you will need to do the following request as HTTP GET:

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/userID?client_id=YourClientID

This will return a JSON-Result, which will contain the username inside the data section.

Now you can use http://instagram.com/username as your link.

Answer 2

try

async function insta(uid) {
  let api = `https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/${uid}/info/`
  let info = await (await fetch(api)).json();
  return `https://www.instagram.com/${info.user.username}`;
}

async function go() {
  let url = await insta(userId.value);
  link.innerText = url;
}

Type instagram user id:
<input id="userId" value=182805585 />
<button onclick="go()">Find username</button><br>
<pre id="link"></pre>

UPDATE

According this starting form 03.12.2019 above solution stops works and returns only

{“message”: “useragent mismatch”, “status”: “fail”}

instead you can try to send request GET

https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/1791879548/info/

with following user-agent header:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148 Instagram 105.0.0.11.118 (iPhone11,8; iOS 12_3_1; en_US; en-US; scale=2.00; 828x1792; 165586599)