Reporters covering events such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings or the Boston Marathon bombings turned immediately to Instagram to source photos from the scene -- a difficult endeavor, given the limitations of Instagram's in-app search to hashtags and usernames.
Enter Al Shaw, news application developer at ProPublica, a non-profit news organization focused on investigative journalism. He created an open-source tool that allows users to search Instagram by place and by time. Specifically, you can search by start date and end date, address and distance from that address. There are some limitations: You can't, for example, combine those searches with text or hashtags -- Instagram's API doesn't allow that, Shaw said -- and results are confined to the last few months.
ProPublica staffers have already used the tool to surface a photo taken of Bolyston Street a few minutes after the Boston bombings, and a photo of Newt Gingrich outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Here's what they pulled up from a search at the New Orleans Fair Grounds last Thursday, where the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival was taking place:
To use the tool, you'll need to download the Ruby web app from GitHub and run it on your desktop. Shaw says ProPublica may or may not release a more consumer-friendly (i.e., web-hosted) version of the app in the future.