Warning: Instagram has made scraping really difficuly/nearly impossible. This tool may not work as intended. We would like to fix it but as Instagram is actively trying to prevent scraping this may not be possible. Apologies!

DMI Instagram Scraper

This package provides a simple GUI on top of instaloader. Instaloader is a great Instagram scraper, but it requires familiarity with command-line interfaces or Python to use. For people who do not have that familiarity, this GUI makes it possible to scrape Instagram and easily collect all scraped data in a single CSV file with metadata.

The scrape runs from the user's own computer. This can be contrasted with tools like 4CAT, which run scrapes from a central server. The disadvantage of that approach is that Instagram's aggressive rate limiting kicks in quickly if many scrapes are run from a central server. By using this app, all scrapes are run from the local computer, hopefully preventing rate limiting from being too obstructive.

CSV files generated by the DMI Instagram Scraper can be imported into 4CAT for further analysis.

There is a FAQ with some more information on the application.

Installation

Via pip

This is recommended if you have some familiarity with Python, since it makes it easier to ensure you are running the latest version of the software.

pip3 install dmi-instascraper

Then to run it

python3 -m dmi_instascraper

Via pre-packaged binaries

This is the simplest way of running the app; download the application file and run it.

One-file binaries for Windows and macOS are (or will soon be) provided on the releases page.

License

This software was developed by the Digital Methods Initiative, and is distributed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 license. See LICENSE for details.