instagram

Get Instagram post on-screen text

Reads the text shown on an Instagram post's images: the headlines, list items, captions and meme text creators design into a photo, a carousel slide or a reel cover, which the post caption never carries. What is read depends on the post. On a photo, the photo itself. On a carousel, every slide in order, up to the first 10 slides; a longer carousel is read to slide 10 and the response carries a warning giving its full slide count. On a reel or video, the cover frame only. This is AI OCR of the published images, so it does not read text that appears only later in a reel's video. texts is the deduplicated union of every image's text in slide order, images lists each image read with its own texts and its 0-based index in the post's media list (so a carousel caller knows which slide said what), media_type is image, video or carousel, and source is ocr when any text was found and none otherwise. A post with no text on it returns empty arrays (that is a real answer, not an error). If some slides cannot be read, those slides carry texts: null and the response carries a warning.

get/instagram/media/screen-text

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/instagram/media/screen-text
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

urlstring required

Full URL of the Instagram post, reel or video (a /p/, /reel/, /reels/ or /tv/ link)

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "instagram",
  "endpoint": "/v1/instagram/media/screen-text",
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.