On April 4, Instagram (IG) surprise announced they were making a set of restrictions to their API, effective immediately. These changes will impact your usage of MBD Curator, as they impact all social media aggregators and any third-party service that uses Instagram’s API.
Moving forward with social aggregators:
- It is no longer possible to add unowned IG accounts as sources to a feed. In MBD Curator, we must have the login information for the IG account and connect the account to your MBD Curator Feed.
- If you have already added an unowned IG account as a source to your feed, this source will no longer pull in new posts, although old posts should remain unaffected. If you have login access to this IG account, you should have us connect it to your MBD Curator Feed. Once we do this, it should start displaying new posts again.
- You can continue to aggregate IG hashtag posts, but the profile images and full names will no longer appear. @usernames will still be visible.
- It is no longer possible to manually add posts from IG accounts. IG has disabled this part of their API.
Obviously, this is a sudden change. Unfortunately, these restrictions were issued without warning, and have impacted many apps across the web who work with Instagram’s API. The changes were made due to recent pressure on Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) to tighten security – you have likely seen news stories on this topic in recent weeks.
We will update this post as new information becomes available. Please contact us with any questions. You can read the full announcement from Facebook about these changes on their website here.
