Karten 1.1.1 Released

A new version of Karten has been released.

Fixed warnings, cleaned up logic. Usernames are now optional. Instead of searching for a user’s/users’ recent media, you are now able to search for just a particular hashtag using the date ranges and count variable.

It turns out the “Maximum number of posts” settings field is a little deceiving. The default number of posts that the Instagram API will return is 20, unless otherwise specified. It appears the maximum number returned by the API before results are paginated is 33, regardless if the specified request is higher.  I’ve updated the “Maximum number of posts” field to accept a maximum number of 33. Use this with caution. If the number is changed to 30, the API query will return 30 results (if there are that many) but it is unable to determine if the resulting posts have the desired hashtag and/or geolocation information – those checks are done inside the plugin. This means that if only 5 posts have the relevant hashtag and geolocation info in the 30 that were returned by the API, then only 5 will be displayed. The easiest way around this is to focus your map around a date range that you know has the posts you want to display and break it up into several maps.

If the number is changed to 60, the query will return 33 (the max) of the most-recent paginated results. It’s possible that none of the first 33 results match the hashtag and/or have geolocation information. In this case there are still 27 results yet to be returned and parsed by the plugin that may or may not have the necessary information to display on a map. If pagination were implemented, the map would have no pins plotted but there would be a link for the “Next” results. This is not a good user interface.

Unfortunately, there is no way to search the API for a user associated with a particular hashtag nor is there a way to search for a specific hashtag used by a user. This is a severe limitation of the Instagram API, as there’s a chance that in a request, none of the posts returned match the hashtag and/or have latitude/longitude coordinates – the search in the plugin is not 1:1 to the capabilities of the search in the API. Because of this, it could potentially require many API calls to get the number of results set in the plugin to match the number output on the map. For these reasons, I will not be implementing pagination until updates to the Instagram API have been made. The maximum number of most-recent posts that are visible on a map is 33.

In the user’s recent media query endpoint, I would like to see:
– A TAGS parameter option to query a user’s posts with a specific hashtag
– A GEOTAGGED parameter enum to return either only posts that have geolocation information, only posts that aren’t geotagged, or a default of both/all.

You can contact Instagram and request this feature.

Please log bugs on GitHub if you find them. I will address bugs as my time permits – I have a full-time job, so it may be awhile. Sadly, I will likely not be devoting much more time to development on Karten unless the Instagram API changes. Pull requests of any fixes/updates would be appreciated.

Thanks for using Karten!