Instaloader: Download Photos and Videos with Captions and Metadata from Instagram

If you want to backup your Instagram account but don’t want to request a backup from facebook or you’re just looking for a good Instagram scraping OSINT tool, you should take a look at Instaloader.

Instaloader is a free and open source tool written in Python that allows you to download pictures and videos along with their captions and other metadata from Instagram. Being a python library you can also write your own scripts to spot ghost followers for example.

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Features:

downloads public and private profiles, hashtags, user stories, feeds and saved media,
downloads comments, geotags and captions of each post,
automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly,
allows fine-grained customization of filters and where to store downloaded media,

Installation:

Open up a terminal and use pip3 install instaloader to install. To update use pip3 install --upgrade instaloader

If you’re using Arch/Manjaro, Instaloder is available in AUR. Windows 10 users can download the standalone executable.

Usage:

1. To download all pictures and videos of a profile, as well as the profile picture use instaloader profile username. You can also specify a list of usernames. It’ll also help if you cd to where you want to save your Instagram data.

2. To update the local copy of your downloaded username use instaloader --fast-update profile username.Using this options, Instaloader stops when arriving at the first already-downloaded picture. When updating profiles, Instaloader automatically detects profile name changes and renames the target directory accordingly.

3. To download private profiles, you will need to login. Use instaloader --login=your_username profile username.

NOTE: When logging in, Instaloader stores the session cookies in a file in your temporary directory, which will be reused later the next time –login is given. So you can download private profiles non-interactively when you already have a valid session cookie file.

4. To download a user’s stories, geotags, highlights, comments or photos that tagged your specific user use