Downloading Instagram Followers Lists
If you need to scrape the follower list of an Instagram account, you’re in for an up-hill battle as there is no public Instagram API to get followers and Instagram is notorious for suing companies who provide this as a service and banning individuals who try this via automated scraping means.
However, if you really need to save an Instagram followers list from a public account (or your own), then we’ll walk through how to do this using our HAR File Web Scraper to legally scrape Instagram followers of any Instagram account you have access to, without violating the Instagram Terms of Service nor risking your account getting banned.
Note that you will only be able to obtain the list of usernames using this approach, and not any personal details like email address. You will also be cut off after however many followers Instagram will show on its webpage. For some large accounts, this can be after a few tens of thousands, but is pretty random so you will only be able to get the complete follower list of smaller accounts.
Go To The Instagram Profile
To get started, you simply need to use the Instagram Website and log in to your account. Next, browse to the profile you want to scrape the followers of or just use a direct link to the account, e.g. https://www.instagram.com/therock/
Open Developer Tools
On your web browser (we’ll assume you’re using Google Chrome, but these instructions should be similar for any browser), right click anywhere on the page and hit Inspect
to open up developer tools (this will allow you to record your web traffic with the follower list). You can then click on the “Network” tab to see your web traffic with the data in it.
Scroll Through Followers
Now click on the follower count and scroll down through the list (with developer tools open). For larger followings, Instagram will cut you off after a few thousand followers or so, so unfortunately there’s nothing you can do about this to get the full list.
Export HAR File
Once you’re done scrolling, look for a download arrow in your browser’s developer tools (Network Tab) that’s labeled something along the lines of “Export HAR…” Click this and save the HAR file somewhere you can access quickly, like your Desktop:
Upload to HAR File Web Scraper
Now that we have the data inside this large file, the trick is to get the data out of this file. For this, we suggest using our HAR File Web Scraper where you can upload the file here, and the software will parse everything out for you and group together all the different requests with the follower list in it:
You can click the disk icon next to each of the requests to download the data for free, or scroll up and click the “Parse Group” button (above all the individual responses) to download a combined CSV file with the followers in it (note this is a paid feature):
You can see that the HAR File Scraper combined all of the individual requests into a single list of 158 items that you can now download as a single CSV file. This will allow you to export Instagram followers to excel via CSV file, simply open Excel and import the CSV file of the followers list on Instagram.