If you need a backup of your Instagram account but don’t wish to request assistance from Facebook, or simply desire a good OSINT tool for Instagram scraping, Instaloader is a great option to consider.
Using Instaloader, a free and open source Python tool, you can access photos, videos and associated captions, as well as other metadata, from Instagram. Additionally, being a Python library, you can craft your own scripts to identify ghost followers, for example.
Instaloader’s Features:
- downloads public and private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved media,
- downloads comments, geotags and captions of each post,
- automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly,
- allows fine-grained customization of filters and where to store downloaded media,
- automatically resumes previously-interrupted download iterations.
instaloader [--comments] [--geotags]
[--stories] [--highlights] [--tagged] [--igtv]
[--login YOUR-USERNAME] [--fast-update]
profile | "#hashtag" | :stories | :feed | :saved
Installation
In order to install, open a terminal and enter “pip3 install instaloader“. To upgrade, type in “pip3 install --upgrade instaloader“.
$ pip3 install instaloaderinstaloader [--comments] [--geotags]
[--stories] [--highlights] [--tagged] [--igtv]
[--login YOUR-USERNAME] [--fast-update]
profile | "#hashtag" | :stories | :feed | :savedHow to Automatically Download Pictures from Instagram
To download all pictures and videos of a profile, as well as the profile picture, do
instaloader profile [profile ...]
where profile is the name of a profile you want to download. Instead of only one profile, you may also specify a list of profiles.
To later update your local copy of that profiles, you may run
instaloader --fast-update profile [profile ...]If --fast-update is given, Instaloader stops when arriving at the first already-downloaded picture.
Alternatively, you can use --latest-stamps to have Instaloader store the time each profile was last downloaded and only download newer media:
instaloader --latest-stamps -- profile [profile ...]With this option it’s possible to move or delete downloaded media and still keep the archive updated.
When updating profiles, Instaloader automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly.
Instaloader can also be used to download private profiles. To do so, invoke it with
instaloader --login=your_username profile [profile ...]When logging in, Instaloader stores the session cookies in a file in your temporary directory, which will be reused later the next time --login is given. So you can download private profiles non-interactively when you already have a valid session cookie file.
The extensive documentation provided by Instaloader is truly remarkable and available for your reference. In addition, it is recommended that you also consult the help page.