We built a module that if three unique users (with individual access
tokens) try to access the same photo url but can't (because it's been
deleted), a process will remove the photo from our datasource.

Not an ideal way of doing it, but there is no real-time push for deletes
(yet...?).

I attempted a method of using jQuery to check the onerrror event when
loading the image. Problem is you need to bind the event before loading the
image... so you have to dynamically update the src attribute of the image
after binding the event. A massive pain. Each deleted image throws a 403
response but there's no proper way to handle this.

I dont remember exactly how I did it, but in my web app I used jquery to
post to Instagram then I checked the response for an "All-Clear" and
after that I used jquery to search for that specific photo on the page and
deleted it dynamically from the users feed. That logic also works for
comments too but it requires that you use lots of attributes which isnt a
bad idea anyway. I could help more but the jquery functions that i used in
this situation really depend on which version of jquery that you use.