Profile picture download from Instagram

[tobiasff3200]

Describe the bug

The download of profile pictures from Instagram is not working for my setup.
While testing the code locally, I discovered that the Instagram page does not fit to the code and has probably changed. But the link to the profile picture is still present on the page.
The easiest way to get it is the regex: /"profile_pic_url":\s?"(.*)",/U
With that I was able to extract the URL and get the image.

Steps to reproduce

Download page

$url = "https://www.instagram.com/{username}/\?__a\=1";
$options = array('http' => array('user_agent' => 'Googlebot / 2.1'));
$context = stream_context_create($options);
$result = file_get_contents($url,false, $context);

extract URL with preg_match
Check URL in browser

Expected behavior

The profile picture gets extracted.

Actual behavior

The profile picture is not extracted.

Contact version

8.8.0 / main branch

Operating system

Ubuntu Server

PHP engine version

PHP 8.3

Web server

Nginx

Database

MySQL

Additional info

No response

[call-me-matt]

I confirm Instagram Provider does not work any more.
It seems they shut down the unauthenticated JSON endpoint (appending ?__a=1 to profile URLs).

While the profile HTML page loads in a regular web browser with client-side JavaScript, dynamically fetching and rendering the content - it fails when queried directly via PHP. Server-side requests without authenticated session cookies receive only a lightweight HTML shell or get redirected to a login wall. As a result, the identified keys (like "profile_pic_url") are missing from the raw HTML payload received by PHP, causing scraping attempts to return empty results.