Tool to download Instagram pictures (or videos) and captions from a given set of profiles (even if private), from your feed or from all followees of a given profile.
Project description
Tool to automatically download pictures (or videos) of given profiles from Instagram.
Installation
Instaloader is written in Python, thus ensure having Python (at least version 3.5) installed.
If you intend to use this tool under Windows, it is recommended to install win-unicode-console.
If you have pip installed, you may install Instaloader using
pip3 install instaloader
Alternatively, to get the most current version of Instaloader from our Git repository:
pip3 install git+https://github.com/Thammus/instaloader
(pass --upgrade to upgrade if Instaloader is already installed)
Instaloader requires requests, which will be installed automatically, if it is not already installed.
How to automatically download pictures from Instagram
To download all pictures and videos of a profile, as well as the profile picture, do
instaloader 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 profiles, you may run
instaloader --fast-update profile [profile ...]
When --fast-update is given, Instaloader stops when arriving at the first already-downloaded picture.
Instaloader can also be used to download private profiles. To do so, invoke it with
instaloader --login=your_username profile [profile ...]
When invoked like this, it also stores the session cookies in a file in your temporary directory, which will be reused later when --login is given. So you can download private profiles non-interactively when you already have a valid session cookie file.
You may also download the most recent pictures by hashtag:
instaloader "#hashtag"
If you want to download all followees of a given profile, call
instaloader --login=your_username @profile
To download all the pictures from your feed which you have liked, call
instaloader --login=your_username :feed-liked
or to download all pictures from your feed:
instaloader --login=your_username :feed-all
Advanced Options
The following flags can be given to Instaloader to specify how profiles should be downloaded.
- --fast-update
Stop when encountering the first already-downloaded post of a profile.
- --profile-pic-only
Only download profile pictures. Without this flag, the current profile picture and all the profile’s posts are downloaded.
- --skip-videos
Skip posts which are videos.
- --geotags
Also download geotags and store Google Maps links in separate textfiles.
- --count COUNT
If used with #hashtag, :feed-all or :feed-liked: Do not attempt to download more than COUNT posts.
- --quiet
Do not output any messages except warnings and errors. This option makes Instaloader suitable as a cron job.
- --no-sleep
Normally, Instaloader waits a few seconds between requests to the Instagram servers. This flag inhibits this behavior.
- --password PASSWORD
If used with --login, use parameter as password if no valid session file is found, instead of asking interactively.
- --sessionfile FILE
Specify an alternative place for loading and storing the session cookies. Without this flag, they are stored in a path within your temporary directory, encoding your local username and your instagram profile name.
To get a list of all flags, run instaloader --help.
Usage as Python module
You may also use parts of Instaloader as library to do other interesting things.
For example, to get a list of all followees 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:
passYou could also download your last 20 liked pics with
instaloader.download_feed_pics(session, max_count=20, fast_update=True,
filter_func=lambda node:
not node["likes"]["viewer_has_liked"] if "likes" in node else not node["viewer_has_liked"])To download the last 20 pictures with hashtag #cat, do
instaloader.download_hashtag('cat', session=instaloader.get_anonymous_session(), max_count=20)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'])Release history Release notifications | RSS feed
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