Instagram API: Get User ID, User Info and Posts by User

These operations read public Instagram identity data without an Instagram login, and they answer the three lookups developers search for most. To get a user ID, send a username to Get User Profile: it returns the numeric Instagram id as instagramId alongside the full public profile — bio, follower and following counts, post count, verified and business-account status and the profile picture URL. To get user info from an id you already hold, Get User By Id starts from the numeric id instead of a handle. On the anonymous surface it can return identity only — the username and profile picture — and says so in its detailLevel field; a count Instagram does not disclose comes back as null, never as zero followers. Check Account answers a narrower question — does a username, email address or phone number belong to an existing Instagram account, and which recovery channels does it expose — which is the check to run before a profile lookup that would otherwise come back empty. To get posts by user, take the id from either lookup and pass it to Get User Posts, covered on the Instagram Post Scraper API page linked below. None of these needs an Instagram account, password or session cookie; every call authenticates with your upAPI key alone. Instagram serves a logged-out visitor a blank shell rather than a clean error when it refuses a read, so these operations classify that shell and raise a real error instead of quietly returning an empty profile — a change verified against production on 2026-09-10. The exact price and cache lifetime are on this page’s FAQ, generated from the same catalog the calls run against.

Last updated 2026-10-20