I've done a fair bit of searching on the Instagram API docs and can't find a way to determine whether or not a user has a public or protected profile?

This also has to be done without an access_token. I have a client_id to use.

Just for a bit of context, I'm just building a small practice app which reads a csv of usernames in PHP and then makes a call to the API to determine whether it is public or private.

I've done a fair bit of searching on the Instagram API docs and can't find a way to determine whether or not a user has a public or protected profile?

This also has to be done without an access_token. I have a client_id to use.

Just for a bit of context, I'm just building a small practice app which reads a csv of usernames in PHP and then makes a call to the API to determine whether it is public or private.

• javascript
• php
• json
• api
• instagram

• 1 Updated information here: Instagram Basic Display API: How to check if user's Instagram account is public or private? – showdev Commented Nov 17, 2020 at 18:51

2 Answers 2

Use the GET relationship endpoint.

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/user-id/relationship

This endpoint returns a BOOL value "target_user_is_private".

You can use the User Media endpoint with client_id:

https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/USER_ID/media/recent/?client_id=YOUR-CLIENT_ID

If the user is private you will get a response like this:

{"meta":{"error_type":"APINotAllowedError","code":400,"error_message":"you cannot view this resource"}}

If the user is public, then you will get API response with "code":200 with user recent media data - "data":[...]