How Actowiz Solutions Scraped Instagram Photos And Descriptions.

How-to-Scrape-Instagram-Account-Photos-and-Descriptions-Using-Python

Instagram scraping is the automatic process of collecting publicly available data from Instagram users. The method includes Instagram scraping services, scraping tools, or manually extracting the data. You can easily scrape data like phone numbers, email addresses, bio, images, comments, likes, etc.

For data scraping, Python is the most preferred language. Libraries like Scrapy, BeautifulSoup, and Pandas ease the process of extracting data, analysis, and visualization.

You can easily scrape photos from an Instagram account if you are an account follower or it’s an open account that writes a photo explanation for each photo to an excel sheet.

Which Language is Used for Scraping?

To run this program, you require Python 3.x. You also need to install some of the libraries before running the program. Using python package manager pip, you can easily install them. Some of them are:

Xlswriter1.x
Requests2.x
BeautifulSoup 4.x
1xml 4.x for parsing data
Selenium 3.x

For controlling, you will require a browser driver. Here, we are using ChromeDriver for Linux. You can download it from:

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

However, if you prefer working on any browser or operating system, you will require a driver specific to that browser or OS. Using instaScraper.py, you can easily change the path to the driver simply by changing the value of the self.driver.

How to Execute?

Run the program in the terminal to clone the project code or download it.

Next, to execute, run the main.py in the terminal as mentioned

How to Implement?

First, enter your account’s Username and Password

Next, enter the target username. Make sure you follow that account, or it’s an open account.

After entering all credentials and the target username, the program gets executed as follows:

The Instagram homepage opens and gets your account login.
Generates data.target_username>description & data>target_username>images folder if they are unavailable.
If ant Turn-on notification dialog box is there, it closes.
Then redirects to the target user’s profile. Collects the number of posts
Gets all the posts loaded and fetches the URL of each image
 Transcribes each image description on the excel sheet
 Lastly, download the target account’s images.
 Finally, ends the execution

Limitations

The code of Instagram gets changed from time to time. Hence, it would help if you made specific changes in some of the XPath expressions whenever you ran the code.
In your Instagram account, you have Two-factor Authentication. This should be turned off.
Keep in mind that this program doesn’t download videos.
The program execution time can decrease if you have a speedy internet connection. But, if it’s slow, change the wait time from 10 to whatever suits you in every line that matches the below code in the instaScraper.py file.

For more information, contact Actowiz Solutions now! You can also reach us for all your mobile app scraping and web scraping services requirements.