Instagram Scraper
Skopenow's Jake Creps Has another great tool: Using a Python script can be incredibly helpful when it comes to social media data collection. Using a web app or a browser extension requires using valuable space in your workflow. Additionally, they are often not as quick or reliable as a Python script. Recently I've been using Instagram Scraper by arc298 for social media investigations that require the full extraction of an Instagram profile. I like it because it's very easy to get up and running, especially if you find yourself frequently on different machines. Additionally, it's very user friendly. Once you install the package, you can begin scraping with a single, easy to understand command. Finally, it's fast and it can operate in the background without supervision. I stress tested it against Instagram's own Instagram profile. It was able to download 2450 pieces of content in only a couple of minutes. Instagram Scraper also allows you to upload usernames in bulk. You can either have it read a TXT file and iterate through the list or you can do a few at a time separated by a comma in the command line. This takes it into the set it and forget it category of tools that can greatly increase your efficiency with OSINT. You can also use Instagram Scraper to download images searching with hashtags. This can be extremely helpful for documenting images for trending hashtags of interest. It can also be helpful from a research standpoint to classify images based on a certain topic for applications in computer vision. There's still more value here, believe it or not. Instagram Scraper also lets you scrape content based on location IDs. So if you were doing geolocation-specific work, you could begin collecting data related to a specific hashtag in a certain location very quickly. Whether it's a short term investigation or a long term study, this tool is an absolute must in your toolkit.
