If you want to backup your Instagram account but don’t want to request a backup from facebook or you’re just looking for a good Instagram scraping OSINT tool, you should take a look at Instaloader.
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Instaloader is a free and open source tool written in Python that allows you to download pictures and videos along with their captions and other metadata from Instagram. Being a python library you can also write your own scripts to spot ghost followers for example.
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Features:
- downloads public and private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved media,
- downloads comments, geotags and captions of each post,
- automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly,
- allows fine-grained customization of filters and where to store downloaded media,
Installation:
Open up a terminal and use pip3 install instaloader to install. To update use pip3 install --upgrade instaloader
If you’re using Arch/Manjaro, Instaloder is available in AUR. Windows 10 users can download the standalone executable.
Usage:
1. To download all pictures and videos of a profile, as well as the profile picture use instaloader profile username. You can also specify a list of usernames. It’ll also help if you cd to where you want to save your Instagram data.
2. To update the local copy of your downloaded username use instaloader --fast-update profile username.Using this options, Instaloader stops when arriving at the first already-downloaded picture. When updating profiles, Instaloader automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly.
3. To download private profiles, you will need to login. Use instaloader --login=your_username profile username.
NOTE: When logging in, Instaloader stores the session cookies in a file in your temporary directory, which will be reused later the next time –login is given. So you can download private profiles non-interactively when you already have a valid session cookie file.
4. To download a user’s stories, geotags, highlights, comments or photos that tagged your specific user use
instaloader --stories profile usernameinstaloader --geotags profile usernameinstaloader --highlights profile usernameinstaloader --comments profile usernameinstaloader --tagged profile username
Instaloader has an amazing documentation that you can check here. Also don’t forget to check the help page.
Main photo credit goes to Chris Phillips