Archiving Instagram with Instaloader

As part of the project Best practices for social media archiving in Flanders and Brussels, several tools were tested to archive different social media platforms.

This publication describes the tool Instaloader. Instaloader is used to archive content from Instagram, including private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved media, comments, geotags and captions of each post, and more.

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Inhoud

Installation
Usage
- Archiving an Instagram account
- Notes

Instaloader does the following:

downloads public and private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved media.
downloads reactions, geotags and captions of each post.
automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target folder accordingly.
automatically resumes previously interrupted download iterations.

system requirements

Terminal
Python 3.5 or higher

Installation

pip3 install instaloader

Usage

instaloader options idvantarget

idvantarget: the account name in the URL of the account.

Example:

Archiving an Instagram account

command:

instaloader artinflanders.be

This command ensures that all posts and the current profile picture are downloaded.

Artinflanders Instagram account archiving with Instaloader gif

Options:

This is a selection of options, the full list can be found here.

--stories or -s: Option to also retrieve user stories along with the profile picture and posts. Requires the --login option. Example: instaloader artinflanders.be --stories --login
note that this example will still download the profile picture and the posts, only then the stories. To download only stories use --no-posts and --no-profile-pic
--no-profile-pic: Option to skip downloading the profile picture.
--no-posts: Download content from an account except for the posts. Example: instaloader --login=yourusername idvantarget --no-posts
--highlights: Use this option to download the highlights of that profile. Requires the --login option.
--tagged: Download posts in which the user is tagged.
--igtv: Option to download IGTV videos.
--comments or -C: Download and update comments for each post. This requires an extra request to the Instagram server for each post, therefore it is disabled by default.
--login: This option expects a space followed by the Instagram username / ID of the executor. Example: instaloader --login IDofexecutor --stories -C idvantarget

Notes

To archive private Instagram accounts as well as archiving stories and highlights, it is necessary to provide your own account name / ID (--login) in the command. Instaloader can use this information to gain access to the content of the target account.

An Instagram account with Two Factor Authentication (2FA) enabled cannot be used to provide authentication details in an Instaloader command.