In this post, I'm going to track the engagement of a single Instagram post in real time using the open source Python Instagram scraping library instascrape 🐍.
chris-greening
/
instascrape
Powerful and flexible Instagram scraping library for Python, providing easy-to-use and expressive tools for accessing data programmatically
instascrape: powerful Instagram data scraping toolkit
Note: This module is no longer actively maintained.
DISCLAIMER:
Instagram has gotten increasingly strict with scraping and using this library can result in getting flagged for botting AND POSSIBLE DISABLING OF YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT. This is a research project and I am not responsible for how you use it. Independently, the library is designed to be responsible and respectful and it is up to you to decide what you do with it. I don't claim any responsibility if your Instagram account is affected by how you use this library.
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
…For the purposes of this blog post, we'll be scraping a single post across one hour. This can easily be extended however to span more posts over longer periods of time with just a couple modifications.
The script
Since instascrape abstracts out a lot of the tedious work, the script is relatively straightforward:
import time
import datetime
import instascrape
def track_post(url: str):
"""
Return a list of datetimes and a list of strings from an
Instagram post scraped across a one hour period.
"""
times = []
likes = []
now = datetime.datetime.now()
end_time = now + datetime.timedelta(hours=1)
while now < end_time:
time.sleep(60)
post = instascrape.Post(url)
post.scrape()
now = datetime.datetime.now()
times.append(now)
likes.append(post.likes)
return times, likes
Now all we have to do is pass a valid Instagram post URL to track_post, wait an hour, and we'll have our data! ⌚
Collecting the data
dates, likes = track_post('https://www.instagram.com/p/CH3E7omnUBj/')
Great! Now plotting our data using matplotlib gives us
In conclusion
Therefore, we're able to track growth of an Instagram post using instascrape very easily 🙌. This was just a simple example but can have many applications. You can compare growth at different times of day, track how your posts perform over time, analyze how posts grow, etc.
If you're interested in learning more about instascrape, check out some of my other blog posts
or better yet, drop the official repository a star ⭐ and get involved with contributions!
chris-greening
/
instascrape
Powerful and flexible Instagram scraping library for Python, providing easy-to-use and expressive tools for accessing data programmatically
instascrape: powerful Instagram data scraping toolkit
Note: This module is no longer actively maintained.
DISCLAIMER:
Instagram has gotten increasingly strict with scraping and using this library can result in getting flagged for botting AND POSSIBLE DISABLING OF YOUR INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT. This is a research project and I am not responsible for how you use it. Independently, the library is designed to be responsible and respectful and it is up to you to decide what you do with it. I don't claim any responsibility if your Instagram account is affected by how you use this library.
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.
Top comments (1)
I am really gratitude for writing such a useful and concisely Instagram package . Because I mainly focus on R, your examples are very helpful.
I have a question about extracting comments from a post.
I will be wondering, If you provide an example in this issue that shows how I can get all comments in a post and its related parameters.
Thanks a lot