Instagram JSON avatar extraction PHP - php

Question

I want to extract the profile_picture of any instagram user from the JSON url: https://www.instagram.com/just/media/ with PHP and print it out. I've tried:
$instaJSONUrl = 'https://www.instagram.com/just/media/';
$json = file_get_contents($instaJSONUrl);
$json_data = json_decode($json, true);
echo $json_data["profile_picture"];
Not working.. If I print out the $json only, I get:
{status":"ok","items":[],"more_available":false}
Meaning that the problem is with reading the URL. Does this mean I need access token, because I don't want to use one, as I already can get the profile image URL when I open https://www.instagram.com/just/media/ from my browser.

Answer 1

This will result in an array of users and their picture profile links.
<?php
$instaJSONUrl = 'https://www.instagram.com/just/media/';
$json = file_get_contents($instaJSONUrl);
$json_data = json_decode($json, true);
$users = array();
foreach($json_data['items'] as $item)
foreach($item['comments'] as $comment)
foreach($comment as $profile)
$users[$profile['from']['username']] = $profile['from']['profile_picture'];
print_r($users);

Answer 2

Managed to do it via accessing the meta tags directly, and specifically the <meta property="og:image" tag, with the following:
libxml_use_internal_errors(true);
$c = file_get_contents($instaURL);
$d = new DomDocument();
$d->loadHTML($c);
$xp = new domxpath($d);
and then I can print out the image url with:
foreach ($xp->query("//meta[#property='og:image']") as $el) {
echo $el->getAttribute("content");
}
You can even use it to access other properties, such as og:url and og:description for the specific Instagram user.
This is for all those people who needs to access & get Instagram user data (basic: profile_image, profile_url, profile_description, etc.), without dealing with Instagram's API.