How to Scrape Instagram Data using Python in 2024: A Step-by-Step Guide

With the help of Instagram scraping, you can gather publicly available data from Instagram users. You can manually extract the data or use scraping tools and Instagram scraping services. You can scrape data such as bio, likes, comments, images, phone numbers, emails, etc. But let’s first understand why you need to scrape this data.

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Instagram unites individuals and attracts people with its multifaceted topics like fashion, food, fitness, and traveling. You can scrape particular user data such as:

Businesses scrape data from Instagram daily as scraping provides them with rich datasets. It also helps them in:

You can use Instagram scrapers to access the data you require. They save your time by

rapidly scraping Instagram data from profiles and saving all the available information to a ready-to-use .csv file. In short, you can use the scrapers to:

pip install instaloader

First of all, we import the instaloader package.

import instaloader

bot = instaloader.Instaloader()

The above instance of the class comes with lots of built-in properties that are specific for this unique instance within bot.context. It contains the following:

profile = instaloader.Profile.from_username(bot.context, 'python_scripts')
print(type(profile))

These profile objects possess a lot of properties. The below code shows some examples of these properties.

# Instagram Handle and Profile ID
print("Username:", profile.username)
print("User ID", profile.userid)
# Number of Followers and Followees
print("# of followers:", profile.followers)
print("# of followees", profile.followees)

With the help of an instaloader, we can retrieve the list of the usernames of followers and followees ( of a particular username). Remember that you need to log in before trying this code.

We can use the below code to retrieve the usernames of the followers and followees.

# Retrieve the usernames of all followers
followers = [follower.username for follower in profile.get_followers()]

# Retrieve the usernames of all followees
followees = [followee.username for followee in profile.get_followees()]

hashtag = instaloader.Hashtag.from_name(bot.context, 'python')

We load posts with a python tag into a generator object.

python_posts = hashtag.get_posts()

We iterate over the posts and download them.

for index, post in enumarate(python_posts, 1):
    bot.download_post(post, target=f'{hashtag.name}_{index}')

login = session.post('https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/', data={'password': passwd, 'username': user}, allow_redirects=True)

Just add a variable “proxies” like this:

login = session.post('https://www.instagram.com/accounts/login/ajax/', data={'password': passwd, 'username': user}, allow_redirects=True, proxies=proxies)

where

proxies={
'http':'YOUR PROXY',
'https':'YOUR PROXY'
}

Instagram is becoming immensely popular among market analysts, social media influencers, businesses, and online brands. It uses residential and datacenter proxies because of the following reasons:

So, to avoid getting banned on Instagram, social media managers and digital marketers use proxies for simulating multiple accounts from different IP addresses. The proxy acts as an intermediary between the Instagram servers and the user’s computer, masking the actual user IP address with a new one. 

A dedicated datacenter proxy has several features, such as unlimited bandwidth and concurrent connections, dedicated HTTP proxies for easy communication, and IP authentication for more security. With 99.9% uptime, you can rest assured that the dedicated datacenter will always work during any session. Last but not least, ProxyScrape provides excellent customer service and will help you to resolve your issue within 24-48 business hours. 

The other feature of ProxyScrape’s residential proxy is a rotating feature. A rotating proxy helps you avoid a permanent ban on your account because your residential proxy dynamically changes your IP address, making it difficult for the target server to check whether you are using a proxy or not. 

Apart from that, the other features of a residential proxy are: unlimited bandwidth, along with concurrent connection, dedicated HTTP/s proxies, proxies at any time session because of 7 million plus proxies in the proxy pool, username and password authentication for more security, and last but not least, the ability to change the country server. You can select your desired server by appending the country code to the username authentication. 

Next, the best thing would be to change the proxy server based on the country. You just have to append the country ISO_CODE at the end of the IP authentication or username and password authentication.

I hope you got valuable insights into how to scrape Instagram using Python.