Using the Instagram API to get ALL followers

Question

I'm using the Instagram API to get the number of people who follow a given account as follows.

$follow_info = file_get_contents('https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/477644454/followed-by?access_token=ACESS_TOKEN&count=-1');
$follow_info = @json_decode($follow_info, true);

This returns a set of 50 results. They do have a next_url key in the array, but it becomes time consuming to keep on going to the next page of followers when dealing with tens of thousands.

I read on StackOverflow that setting the count parameter to -1 would return the entire set. But, it doesn't seem to...

Answer 1

Instagram limits the number of results returned in their API for all sorts of endpoints, and they change these limits arbitrarily, without warning, presumably to handle server load.

Several similar threads exist:

• Instagram API not fufilling count parameter
• Displaying more than 20 photos in instagram API
• Instagram API: How to get all user media? (see comments on answer too, -1 returns 1 less result).
• 350 Request Limit for Instagram API
• Instagram API: How to get all user media?

In short, you won't be able to increase the maximum returned rows, and you'll be stuck paginating.