instagram-api/highlights

Instagram highlights API — the covers, the titles and the ids

The story highlight tray of a public profile: id, title and cover image for each one. Read from the same logged-out page as the profile, which already carried it.

Parameters

Name	What it is
`handle`	The Instagram handle, without the @.

Handle format and anchor

Handle: handle
Anchor: follower_count

Fields returned

id
title
thumbnail_url
url

What this endpoint does not return.

the media inside a highlightOpening a highlight needs a logged-in session, so there is no logged-out surface to read. This endpoint returns the tray: what exists and what it is called. Measured, and written down in vault/medicoes/2026-09-30-profundidade/cruzamento-instagram.md.
next_cursorThe page does carry an end_cursor and it is dropped. A cursor is only an answer when some parameter accepts it, and accepting one here would mean calling Instagram's GraphQL — another surface, another request. Returning it would promise pagination we do not have.
published_at and metrics per highlightNull. The tray has no date and no counter in it — not hidden, not there.
positionNull, and that is a decision. Instagram orders the tray by recent update, not the owner. Numbering it would invite reading “moved up two places” over an order nobody chose.

A field we cannot read comes back null, never 0. A zero would be a claim about the account; null is a fact about our collection.

Where this goes wrong.

A handle that does not exist returns HTTP 200 on Instagram, with a generic page and no follower_count. That is why this route keeps the profile anchor instead of parsing highlights alone: without it, a typo would come back as an empty tray with success true.

Measured

Measured on 2026-10-01 against the committed 829 KB page for nasa: the tray carries 5 highlights — Roman, Wallpapers, Artemis III, Artemis II, MoonTunes — and has_next_page comes back false, so that is the whole tray and has_more says so.

Cost

1 credit per call. A call that finds nothing costs nothing.

Why does this cost a credit if the profile call already downloaded the page?

Because it downloads it again. The cache is per endpoint and params, so profile and highlights for the same handle are two fetches of about 830 KB each, through the paid residential path. What is free is the parsing, not the bandwidth — and threads/posts has carried the same note since 2026-09-15.

Can I get the photos and videos inside a highlight?

No, and nobody reading a logged-out page can. That needs a session.

Other routes for this platform

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