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📸 Instagram Account Scraper

A research-grade Instagram scraper that extracts all posts from a target account — metadata, captions, likes, dates — and downloads every media file. Built for the PDID (Profile-based Disinformation Detection) research pipeline.

✦ Features

  • 🔍 Scrapes all posts and reels from any public Instagram account
  • 📥 Downloads media (video + audio merged to .mp4, images as .jpg) via yt-dlp
  • 📊 Outputs a styled Excel file per account with clickable media hyperlinks
  • 🔁 Supports multiple accounts in a single session
  • 💾 Saves everything locally next to the script — no hardcoded paths
  • 🍪 Reads cookies directly from your Chrome profile — no manual export

📁 Output Structure

Final-Git/
├── Main.py
├── Setup.py
├── requirements.txt
├── .gitignore
├── accounts/
│   ├── username.xlsx          ← scraped metadata + hyperlinks
│   └── username-media/        ← downloaded videos and images
│       ├── ABC123.mp4
│       └── XYZabc.jpg
└── chrome_profile/            ← saved Chrome session (auto-generated)

⚙️ Setup

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/rayedrah/Insta-nt.git
cd Insta-nt

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt --break-system-packages

(Remove --break-system-packages if not on Arch Linux)

OR use a virtual environment (recommended):

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Run the setup script

python Setup.py

This will:

  • Install all dependencies (yt-dlp, undetected-chromedriver, openpyxl, requests)
  • Open a Chrome window pointed at Instagram login
  • Save your session to chrome_profile/ for future runs 4. Log in to Instagram in the browser window that opens, then press Enter in the terminal.

🚀 Usage

python Main.py
Enter Instagram username (or 'exit'): nasa
[*] Collecting post URLs for @nasa ...
[*] Found 248 unique post URLs.
[*] Created accounts/nasa.xlsx
  [1/248] https://www.instagram.com/nasa/reel/ABC123/
  [+] Downloaded: ABC123.mp4
  [2/248] ...

You can scrape multiple accounts back to back — just enter the next username when prompted. Type exit to quit.

📦 Dependencies

Package Purpose
yt-dlp Media download (video + audio)
undetected-chromedriver Selenium with bot-detection bypass
openpyxl Excel file generation
requests HTTP requests

All installed automatically by Setup.py or via pip install -r requirements.txt.

📋 Excel Output

Each account gets its own .xlsx file with the following columns:

Column Description
URL Direct link to the post
Username Account handle
Caption Full post caption
Likes Like count
Comments Comment count
Date Post timestamp
Media File Hyperlink to downloaded file
Media Type video or image
Scraped At Timestamp of scrape

⚠️ Notes

  • Chrome must be version 146 — update version_main=146 in both scripts if your Chrome version differs
  • The chrome_profile/ and accounts/ folders are excluded from version control via .gitignore
  • This tool is intended for academic and research use only

🔬 Part of the PDID Pipeline

This scraper is part of the Profile-based Disinformation Detection (PDID) project at Purdue University's GRAIL Lab, focused on collecting and analyzing social media content for deepfake and disinformation research.

Stay Curious ✦ Stay Encrypted