A friend needed to perform statistics on multiple months of Instagram posts of famous football clubs. I have therefore established a simple workflow to programmatically extract Instagram post metrics, such as the like and comment counts, for a set of accounts of interest for a given time frame. This code is a convenience tool that makes use of your active Instagram session to extract the posts without using Instagram's API. Please note that the code was written in June 2023 and could at some point not work anymore.
Owing to the use of browser's cookies and your own Instagram account to access the posts programmatically, Instagram might notice an unusual activity on your account and temporarily block it. I therefore suggest you create a new Instagram account specifically for the extraction, to protect your own account. This script was made to provide publicly available data for a Master thesis, i.e. for an educational purpose, and I will not take any responsibility for any deviant use of my code.
- Download
virtualenvif you do not alread have it
pip install virtualenv- Create virtual environment in your folder of interest
virtualenv insta-parsing- Activate the virtual environment
source insta-parsing/bin/activate- Install the libraries of interest in the virtual environment based on the
requirements.txtfile
pip install -r requirements.txtsource insta-parsing/bin/activatepython3 615_import_firefox_session.pyThe list of Instagram accounts should be simply the account IDs formatted as shown in the file clubs.txt.
The time frame should be specified in the file date.txt and should follow the same format.
python3 insta_parsing.pyVerify the printed comments and repeat the download for the accounts which had an error.
- Start Date: June 2023
- Completion Date: June 2023
- Maintenance status: Inactive