title: How can we get real-time Instagram location notifications for our customers?
body: <p>I'm working on a system whose end-users are small and medium business owners. The goal of this feature is to get pictures (in real-time) that others post to Instagram that are tagged with their business location. Note that this is different from pictures that are @-tagged with the business account (ie we want <a href="https://instagram.com/explore/locations/237630908/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this feed</a>, not <a href="https://instagram.com/aydenkitchenbar/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this feed</a>).</p>
  
  <p>I was planning on using the real-time subscriptions system documented <a href="https://instagram.com/developer/realtime/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> since it explains we can subscribe to a location ID and receive notifications about new media at that location. We rolled it out and immediately started failing because there is an unpublished limit of 30 subscriptions (I guess we should have done more googling before starting to build it).</p>
  
  <p>This is basically the same problem outlined <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14065950/instagram-api-real-time-limit">here</a> but that conversation is really stale and I'm not sure the end goal is exactly the same since the proposed solutions won't help me.</p>
  
  <p>There are way too many customer accounts to register more applications to get enough subscriptions (we would have to register thousands of apps). We were hoping that we could use an Instagram user's access token obtained through an Oauth2 workflow to create more subscriptions, but my experiments with that haven't panned out either. I know other people have used large geographic area subscriptions instead of location subscriptions, but this won't scale large enough for us either.</p>
  
  <p>I'm frustrated and confused by this problem because:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>It seems that other applications are getting these pictures in real-time at a scale that wouldn't fit the limit of 30 subscriptions.</li>
  <li>I can't imagine many use cases were 30 subscriptions per application would be a useful feature.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Does anyone have a workaround? Is there a way to use the Instagram User credentials instead of Application credentials? Will I have to resort to polling the location feed regularly and ditch my real-time aspirations?</p>