I am working on a small JavaScript project where I need to retrieve media files from public Instagram post URLs and save them to local storage programmatically. The core challenge is that Instagram does not expose a simple public endpoint for media retrieval so most approaches involve parsing the page response to extract the direct media URL and then using the Fetch API to download the file as a blob and trigger a browser save. I have the basic fetch and blob download working but I am running into CORS issues when trying to request the media URL directly from the client side. Has anyone in the community dealt with CORS restrictions when fetching media from third party URLs in a browser based JavaScript project and found a clean workaround without requiring a backend proxy server.
To my knowledge, there is no way to circumvent CORS on the client side. (the API you are calling will not allow you to circumvent it from the client, that’s why you must use a backend server).