Effective way to detect media removal using Instagram API

Question

I am currently calling the Instagram API to retrieve media files with a specific #hastag. To make this process as efficient as possible and reduce API calls, data is cached on the server.

The purpose of this is to display some messages randomly on the website, but in order to comply with user and Instagram privacy rules, we need to get rid of cached messages if they were deleted from Instagram.

The way I get media right now causes the last endpoint for this tag every time my subscription notifies my application of updates.

So basically I need an effective way to find out if a post has been deleted from Instagram so that I can immediately remove it from my cache. I understand that this can be done with a lot of API calls, but this is not ideal.

Answer 1

When you save any source image / video URL, you can periodically check if that image exists. If not, you can probably safely assume that the original message was deleted. Thus, multiple API calls are replaced with even more datacalls, but this should be much faster and no restrictions apply.