Tracking "Photos You're Tagged In" on Instagram

April 22, 2017 8:07 AM

Question for social media pros and Insta-influencers! I manage Instagram accounts for major brands that are often tagged in other users' pictures, and I need a way to track those mentions. Seems simple enough, right? Complications inside.

- We're not talking hashtags, which are easy enough to track, but tags in the pictures themselves.
- I know there's a whole "Photos you're tagged in" tab in the phone app version of Instagram, but due to the insane volume of mentions, it's not practical to work from a phone, and that tab doesn't appear in desktop Instagram.
- Ultimately, I don't want to capture ALL those mentions, but only tags from a list of about 500 specific authors, so some kind of filtering would be nice.
Is there a third-party tool using the Instagram API that keeps track of "Photos you're tagged in"? Bonus if it already does some analytics stuff, but I'd settle for a way to view those posts on the desktop.

posted by Freyja to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: This is going to be tough, because Instagram doesn't provide any way to find your mentions via their API. You can check out Instagram's API Endpoints to see what developers have to work with. For example, the User Endpoints will let you identify all the media that the user has liked, but there's no way to discover their mentions.

The Instagram phone app is using their own private API. It is technologically possible to discover how your phone app is finding your mentions via the private API, and replicate those requests in a system you build (where you could also perform the filtering you described). It would probably violate their terms of service, and they might make changes to it at any time that could break your system.
posted by reeddavid at 2:32 PM on April 22, 2017

you might be interested in Zapier? I signed up for it a while ago because it seemed like a robust app-integration service (and Pinboard-friendly when IFTTT was less so). haven't used it for Instagram myself, but perhaps the list of already-possible Instagram "zaps" would help.

oh like this! List tagged Instagram photos in a Google Sheets spreadsheet...
posted by cluebucket at 3:10 PM on April 22, 2017

What reeddavid said. You can't track @ mentions or "tap tags" using Instagram's API as a third party tool. Those which are claiming to do so are hacking it together and likely violating the terms of service of the Instagram API. It's a huge pain for everyone who manages brand accounts from the people I've talked to and everybody has this issue -- you're not alone.
posted by kathryn at 4:54 PM on April 22, 2017