My adventures in Instagram came to a sudden and tragic halt once I encountered the bugginess of Instagram's
media/search function. Other people have been documenting a decline in the number of responses they get to this API call for a few months now (see, for example,
here) and at this point I get nothing by Error Code 400 in response to every request. Instagram's
locations/search function does work correctly, but only returns 33 Colorado Springs-geocoded images over an eight-day period encompassing the evacuation of more than 20,000 people from that city. Disappointing!
Bereft of data, I've been investigating Flickr today. I found
this tutorial helpful in getting started. However, for roughly the same period of time I'm seeing only 96 images being shot within a 5km radius of the center of Colorado Springs. I've posted the bulk of the code
here, in case anyone else wants to give it a try.
 |
| A sample of the images drawn from my Flickr data pull |
If anyone has had different experiences with this, I'd be thrilled to hear it, but I'm willing to tentatively say that if you're going back more than a few months and trying to extract data, you should expect to encounter a lot of bad behavior from APIs. This makes a lot of sense given the focus of these companies, but the takeaway: caveat emptor.
No comments:
Post a Comment