Instagram Example

In this Notebook we’ll explore the Instagram API, which is particularly good for finding vintage-looking pictures of cats.

To use this example, you’ll need an Instagram account.

The first step is creating an Instagram client:

// Read about the Instagram at https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/apiplatform/popular/#/portals/organizations/52560d3f-c37a-409d-9887-79e0a9a9ecff/apis/7954/versions/8117
API.createClient('instagramApi', 'https://anypoint.mulesoft.com/apiplatform/repository/v2/organizations/52560d3f-c37a-409d-9887-79e0a9a9ecff/public/apis/7954/versions/8117/files/api.raml');

Instagram requires authentication, so we’ll need to allow it access to our account:

// Authenticate Instagram.
// This will ask you to authenticate with your personal account.
// Don't worry, we have no idea who you are.
API.authenticate(instagramApi);

Great, now we have an authenticated Instagram client with which we can explore the API.

Photos of kittens are just steps away!

Sadly, Instagram doesn’t let us search by keywords, but they do let us search by tag.

Let’s give that a try:

// Want to search for something else? Change this text.
awesomeTag = 'kittens';

// Store the response so we can access it later.
// We can also access the response
// via the $n convention, where n is cell number.
awesomeResponse = instagramApi.tags.tagName(awesomeTag).media.recent.get();

Super! Now we’ve got the results from our tag search in awesomeResponse.

There’s a lot of information there… body, headers, and status.

You can explore the contents of each by opening it with the arrow in the inspector.

We’re most interested in body.data--that’s where the image information is. Let’s capture that in a variable:

awesomeImages = awesomeResponse.body.data;

awesomeImages is now an array of the top responses for our tag search. Woot! But it has all this stuff like captions, timestamps, and likes.

Geez—we just want to see the pictures! Let’s extract all the links from the array so we can click them:

// Notebooks allow to import libraries like jQuery or Underscore
// that would make iterating the array easier, but let's do this the
// old-fashioned way...
report = [], i = -1, numImages = awesomeImages.length;
while (++i < numImages) {
  link = awesomeImages[i].link;
  report.push(link);
}

// Alright! Now we have an array that's only links to awesome images.
// Let's return the result so we have something clicky.
// Warning: we have no idea what these pictures
// might contain and neither do our lawyers.
report;

Great—an array of just awesome images. Success!

You can do lots of other things with the Instagram API—viewing your own profile or friends', searching by lat/lon, or viewing popular media.

Use the cell below to explore the Instagram API:

// Fetch popular Instagram images.
instagramApi.media.popular.get();