instaloader

Simple downloader to fetch all Instagram pictures and captions from a given profile.

Usage

Ensure having Python (at least version 3.3) and python3-requests installed.

If you intend to use this tool under Windows, it is highly recommended to first install win-unicode-console.

After having downloaded instaloader.py, you invoke it with

./instaloader.py profile [profile ...]

where profile is the name of a profile you want to download. Instead of only one profile, you may also specify a list of profiles.

To later update your local copy of that profile, you may run

./instaloader.py --fast-update profile [profile ...]

When --fast-update is given, instaloder terminates when arriving at the first already-downloaded picture.

Instaloader can also be used to download private profiles. To do so, invoke it with

./instaloader.py --login=your_username profile [profile ...]

When invoked like this, it also stores the session cookies in a file in /tmp, which will be reused later when --login is given. So you can download private profiles non-interactively when you already have a valid session cookies file.

If you want to download all followees of a given profile, call

./instaloader.py --login=your_username @profile

The --quiet option makes it also suitable as a cron job.

To get a list of other helpful flags, run ./instaloader.py --help.

Usage as library

You may also use parts of instaloader as library to do other interesting things.

For example, to get a list of all followers of a profile as well as their follower count, do

import instaloader

# login
session = instaloader.get_logged_in_session(USERNAME)

# get followees
followees = instaloader.get_followees(PROFILE, session)
for f in followees:
    print("%i\t%s\t%s" % (f['follower_count'], f['username'], f['full_name']))

Then, you may download all pictures of all followees with

for f in followees:
    try:
        instaloader.download(f['username'], session)
    except instaloader.NonfatalException:
        pass

Each Instagram profile has its own unique ID which stays unmodified even if a user changes his/her username. To get said ID, given the profile's name, you may call

instaloader.get_id_by_username(PROFILE_NAME)

get_followees() also returns unique IDs for all loaded followees. To get the current username of a profile, given this unique ID get_username_by_id() can be used. For example:

instaloader.get_username_by_id(session, followees[0]['id'])