Here’s a better way: http://api.instagram.com/oembed?url=http://instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL/ Render as json object and you can easily extract media id from it — For instance, in PHP $api = file_get_contents(“http://api.instagram.com/oembed?url=http://instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL/”); $apiObj = json_decode($api,true); $media_id = $apiObj[‘media_id’]; For instance, in JS $.ajax({ type: ‘GET’, url: ‘http://api.instagram.com/oembed?callback=&url=http://instagram.com/p/Y7GF-5vftL/’, cache: false, dataType: ‘jsonp’, success: function(data) { try{ var media_id = data[0].media_id; }catch(err){} } … Read more