Instagram Data Scraping API

Instagram API

Instagram used to offer a more open API for accessing public data on a user’s behalf, however has made some extremely restrictive changes limiting the API for business-only use and cannot be used to scrape public data.

Official APIs

Instagram offers APIs to do everything except access public data.

• Deprecated Instagram API - Deprecated Instagram API and intended for non-automated use (e.g. let a user log in to your app via Instagram).
• New Instagram Graph API - Only for business use, not for scraping bulk public data.

Scraping Companies

There are a variety of companies that offer to scrape Instagram data for you if you pay them a lot of money. They are most likely using the open source software linked to below.

• Phantombuster
• ScrapeInsta
• Octoparse
• Find Influencers
• Jarvee - Will post content on your behalf

Open Source Software

If you’re a developer, you may be interested in these open source projects used to collect public data from Instagram:

• Instagram API (Python)
• Instagram API (PHP)
• Instagram Scraper (Python)

Browser Extensions

You can always browse the Instagram Website and use a browser extension to collect data from the HTML you’re viewing:

• Web Scraper
• Grepsr

Email Scraping

Instagram allows business accounts to publicly share their emails on the platform so potential customers and contacts can get in touch with the business. The open source Instagram API source code shows us a few endpoints that can be used to access emails of a specific account.

You’ll need to call an Instagram API Endpoint for each and every account you want to get the email for. Keep in mind that not all accounts choose to share this information, and the only way you’ll know if you can get an email back is to call the endpoint and see what is returned.

See Instagram API User Details for details on accessing the contact information for a specific user.

Hashtag Targeting

A popular technique is to target users who post with hashtags on Instagram and then get their user information. This video covers how one could do this:

You can also review the workflow for scraping emails from Instagram hashtags.

Followers Scraping

If you know of a popular account, you can access that popular account’s full list of Instagram followers using the Instagram API.

See Instagram API User Followers for more details on accessing a user’s follower list.

Stories Scraping

Scrape stories for a particular account and access the raw content of the image or video, as well as structured data such as hashtags, mentions & ad URLs.

See Instagram API User Stories to learn about how to access stories for a specific user.

Comments Scraping

You can access Instagram comments for specific posts at a time. You’ll need to know the post ID to scrape.

See Instagram API Post Comments for information on scraping the comments for a specific post.

Hashtag Scraping

If you’re interested hashtags, you can scrape all of the posts containing a hashtag using another endpoint.

See Instagram API Hashtag Posts for understanding how to fetch a list of posts for a specific hashtag.

Highlights Scraping

Some users pin stories to their profiles as “highlights.” You can access these as well from any account you are authorized to view.

See Instagram API User Highlights for details on getting the list of highlights for a user.

Profile Posts Scraping

Once you have a target account you want to retrieve content for, you can access the posts for that profile, getting back the captions used for each post, the raw media, hashtags & locations used, etc…

See Instagram API User Posts to see how to get posts from a specific user.

Location Scraping

Each Instagram post can be geo-tagged with a location, which can be a general city or a specific venue within a city. You can enter any of these known locations and get back the list of posts tagged in that location, useful for tracking Instagram activity in specific locations around the world and comparing activity, hashtag usage, etc…

See Instagram API Location Posts for more on collecting Instagram posts for a specific location.

Post Likers Scraping

If you have a specific Instagram post in mind, you can collect a list of specific users who liked that post. Instagram only returns back the most recent 1,000 users who liked the post, so if you’re trying to get the list of likers for a high visibility post, you’ll want to consider retrieving the list of the most recent 1,000 on a recurring basis.

See Instagram API Post Likers for more details on how to access likers of a particular post.

Secret Instagram API

Using the open source libraries linked to above, we can reveal a “secret” API that Instagram uses to communicate data between its servers & clients. While the software used to interact with their secret API is made publicly available in the form of their app & website, using this secret API may violate their terms of service (which alone is not illegal).

For fun, we’ve aggregated the “secret” endpoints that the above open source libraries describe. Each URL also includes potential inputs that each endpoint may expect, again - just for fun to illustrate what an official scraping API may look like.

The URLs on this page are provided “as-is” and are for informational purposes only. Use these URLs at your own risk if you’re interested in security research or similar, as using these URLs may violate Instagram’s terms of service and even result in getting your account & IP address banned!