instascrape: powerful Instagram data scraping toolkit

What is it?

instascrape is a lightweight Python package that provides an expressive and flexible API for scraping Instagram data. It is geared towards being a high-level building block on the data scientist's toolchain and can be seamlessly integrated and extended with industry standard tools for web scraping, data science, and analysis.

Key features

Here are a few of the things that instascrape does well:

Powerful, object-oriented scraping tools for profiles, posts, hashtags, reels, and IGTV
Scrapes HTML, BeautifulSoup, and JSON
Download content to your computer as png, jpg, mp4, and mp3
Dynamically retrieve HTML embed code for posts
Expressive and consistent API for concise and elegant code
Designed for seamless integration with Selenium, Pandas, and other industry standard tools for data collection and analysis
Lightweight; no boilerplate or configurations necessary
The only hard dependencies are Requests and…

The data points

The best way to learn is by example so we'll take a look at an individual post from @google's scraped Instagram data.

All instascrape scrapers have a to_dict method that returns all data as a dictionary so we can see everything in one shot.

from instascrape import Post 
google_post = Post('https://www.instagram.com/p/CGiWeQjl4DI/')
google_post.scrape()
google_post.to_dict()
>>>
{'csrf_token': 'UPIA1ETx3inJYcyZXJloxvfBcxbpZOHu',
 'viewer': None,
 'viewer_id': None,
 'country_code': 'US',
 'language_code': 'en',
 'locale': 'en_US',
 'device_id': '12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012',
 'browser_push_pub_key': 'BIBn3E_rWTci8Xn6P9Xj3btShT85Wdtne0LtwNUyRQ5XjFNkuTq9j4MPAVLvAFhXrUU1A9UxyxBA7YIOjqDIDHI',
 'key_id': '108',
 'public_key': 'ae57c2c94c4afb24eeda9cd759faeeb034086d0ebe60e90123baed5e38c3304f',
 'version': '10',
 'is_dev': False,
 'rollout_hash': 'b10813bd9030',
 'bundle_variant': 'es6',
 'frontend_dev': 'prod',
 'id': '2423598385863295176',
 'shortcode': 'CGiWeQjl4DI',
 'height': 1350,
 'width': 1080,
 'gating_info': None,
 'fact_check_overall_rating': None,
 'fact_check_information': None,
 'sensitivity_friction_info': None,
 'media_overlay_info': None,
 'media_preview': 'ACEq3DTDWKNRIUlcZLbj7jgH3961kk3qGGOf6dabdhWuOxSYqpHdeYdwO5D0PTjpnHtVsEEZHI9RVJisJiiloouI5/yAPWrlpHvjdT0ByPUE+n5VB15NXLN8Fl7Yz+VZN6GqRUjjMR2nIzwPf/61NVGhfb1BBwfb3HrV3yguZmOS33R2VfX6mgrvQ4AJx3/PH0qouys9f8yGru5DuPt+Roqvu9lopXLshS9OibYGdjhdpHuSemKio9PwqRl2OTfahjkYBH6/5/lUbXIhXHU449/enaodsIA4G4DArHh+brz9aaEyx9ob2op+0egop3FY/9k=',
 'display_url': 'https://scontent-lga3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/e35/p1080x1080/122016367_1013895575740222_4221948305990255791_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-lga3-1.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=110&_nc_ohc=FUfhUeFsllQAX_X5TZr&tp=1&oh=9ccf953089eed8e561f7b47d38eb8357&oe=6014039B',
 'accessibility_caption': 'Photo by Google on October 19, 2020. Image may contain: outdoor.',
 'is_video': False,
 'tracking_token': 'eyJ2ZXJzaW9uIjo1LCJwYXlsb2FkIjp7ImlzX2FuYWx5dGljc190cmFja2VkIjp0cnVlLCJ1dWlkIjoiNGNkMjVjN2QxMzY3NDk0OWE5Y2VmNzA0ZWQ0YTc1NmYyNDIzNTk4Mzg1ODYzMjk1MTc2In0sInNpZ25hdHVyZSI6IiJ9',
 'tagged_users': [],
 'caption': 'Working from home can be ruff, but having #Dooglers around helps. 🐾 Tap the link in our bio to learn how Googlers are keeping our dog-friendly company culture going, even outside of the paw-ffice.',
 'caption_is_edited': False,
 'has_ranked_comments': False,
 'comments': 527,
 'comments_disabled': False,
 'commenting_disabled_for_viewer': False,
 'timestamp': 1603135463,
 'likes': 147553,
 'location': nan,
 'viewer_has_liked': False,
 'viewer_has_saved': False,
 'viewer_has_saved_to_collection': False,
 'viewer_in_photo_of_you': False,
 'viewer_can_reshare': True,
 'video_url': nan,
 'has_audio': nan,
 'video_view_count': nan,
 'username': 'google',
 'full_name': 'Google',
 'upload_date': datetime.datetime(2020, 10, 19, 15, 24, 23),
 'hashtags': ['Dooglers']}