Thread Genius
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Thread Genius API - Search Instagram photos containing any product 🔍

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Thread Genius is a visual search API for style-focused applications.

We enable developers to build more intuitive experiences for discovering visual content.

Grab a free API key from our website and get started in a matter of seconds.

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Maker
Hey everyone! I'm a co-founder of Thread Genius along with . We're creating a new type of visual search engine originally motivated by the following question: "How do stylish people in the world wear this product?" After launching our mobile app last year, we decided to open up our visual search platform and see what kinds of creative applications people would build on top of it. So far, we've seen use cases ranging from influencer search to evergreen affiliate product links to targeting product ads at the right audiences. We've designed our API to operate on 3 simple building blocks. 0️⃣ Indexing + Search: Create and manage custom image indices or use publicly available feeds that we constantly index (currently Shopstyle and Bloglovin'). Query them with images or keywords. 1️⃣ Tagging: Predict product-based attributes associated with a photo (think patterns, colors, detailing) 2️⃣ Detection: Predict where the products are located within a photo How to get started using our API: 🔑 Grab a key from 📖 Check out example code at 🔨 Start making things! Our team is constantly working on improving Thread Genius, so we'd love to hear any kind of feedback from you all. Happy building! Thanks! 🙌
Maker
hey and all you product lovers! I worked with Thread Genius over the summer to build the API Swift Client. I hope you love this product as much as I do and go on over to threadgenius.co to grab a key and start exploring!
is this authorized by IG? I'm not sure I've ever seen an official meta API like this that was endorsed by IG. Also, how do you deal with performance optimization when you're downstream from another company's API?
Maker
Hi Chris! That's a great question. Much like how Google or Bing crawls and indexes web pages and media content on the web, we do the same with publicly available social media imagery. In terms of performance optimization, there's the aspect of not having to go through an API + we continually batch process / index all the photos offline.
oh — so you're just web scraping IG? That makes more sense...! Do you charge for access? It wasn't clear if there's a charge for use, or how you might throttle access?
Maker
Hi Chris, API is free up to 10K tag/detect calls per month, and 15K items in your catalog :)
It's a well-designed website. I like it. And I'm sure the API is very useful, but I have no idea how to use it. Could you provide some use cases of how other people using it?
Maker
Thank you! You can sign up for a free API key at and check out some examples at . We’ve designed our API on top of three simple functions with which people have been applying to finding style influencers via image query, classifying fashion-related images, and making images shoppable. Hope that helps!
Have seen a number of demos of this product and it's incredible (it actually works). Super useful if you're a brand trying to target ads at an audience that already loves your products (or similar products). Or, for a company, discovering influencers that would be great ambassadors for your product.

Awesome and domain-specific image search with super-fast results and no time to get set up. Working great so far...

Pros:

Solid API, great docs, truly unique capabilities!

Cons:

More SDKs please!

The question is are we allowed to use instagram photos of people? I'm afraid of law here

Will certainly get my team to use it in the next sprint

Pros:

Simple Use Case , Powerful Application , Excellent Results with Simple Ux

Cons:

Currently seems to be working for only western dresses

I need someone to help me do the coding around this. Any suggestions?
Maker
Hi Juan! Have you checked out our docs? . Let me know if you have any further questions. Happy to help :)
I did see that, but I don't code. How would I get implemented for my products?
Hey , I'm really excited to mess around with this but running into some issues using the shopstyle catalog - Constantly getting 'Catalog not found' errors while trying curl "" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X GET -u ":" Is access to the shopstyle catalog not part of the free tier ? - thanks
Maker
Hey Faisal, searching works, getting metadata about public catalogs doesn't yet. Try this: curl -X POST -u "YOUR_KEY:" -d '{ "image": {"url": "YOUR_URL"}, "n_results": 3 }'
The website still says "Instagram" is coming soon. When can we expect it?