How to Scrape Data from Instagram

Web scraping has become a crucial method for obtaining insightful data from internet platforms in today’s data-driven society.

As an extremely popular social media site, Instagram provides a lot of user-generated material. And, these generated data can be used for marketing, research, and other reasons.

Users can extract data from Instagram with ease and effectiveness thanks to Bright Data’s feature-rich Instagram scrapers, a leading web scraping tool. In this post, we’ll give a thorough, step-by-step walkthrough of the Instagram scraping process.

So, let’s see the steps for how can we scrape data from Instagram.

Understanding Instagram Scrapers from Bright Data

With the help of two all-purpose web scrapers and a pre-compiled dataset, Bright Data provides a variety of Instagram scraping services. These technologies offer versatility in data extraction and adapt to various demands.

Let’s examine each of these choices in more detail:

a. Scraping Browser

The innovative technology known as Scraping Browser was created to fulfill the demands of data scraping projects. It offers everything required for scraping at scale inside of a single browser. It stands out thanks to its integrated website unblocking automation, which makes it the only browser of its sort in the whole globe.

Scraping Browser gives users access to robust features that go beyond automated and headless browsers, allowing them to get beyond even the most difficult scripts and website barriers for bot detection.

Data scraping is more effective and hassle-free because of its automated adjustment features, which easily manage fresh blocks, CAPTCHA solutions, fingerprints, and retries, and appears as a genuine user.

Using AI to outsmart bot-detection systems

By utilizing cutting-edge AI technology, Scraping Browser can outwit bot-detection systems and continually adjust to their shifting strategies. To better unlock webpages, Scraping Browser learns from these systems’ attempts to detect and block scraping attempts and modifies its behavior appropriately.

It outperforms the efficiency of conventional proxies by imitating the behavior of a browser used by a real user. As a result, customers may concentrate on their goals for data scraping without having to deal with the difficulty and expense of ongoing bot-detection procedures.

b. Web Scraper IDE

A robust web scraping tool created for developers, Web Scraper IDE can handle complex scraping tasks. It considerably lowers development time while providing infinite scalability thanks to its completely hosted solution and pre-built scraping features. The application enables the rapid and scalable building of online scrapers by providing code templates and ready-made JavaScript functions from popular websites.

Everything required for successful web scraping is provided by the Web Scraper IDE. It is a complete solution for online data extraction since integration options enable customers to plan crawls or launch them through API and link with main storage systems.

How to Use It? – Tutorial

First, navigate to the user dashboard on the website.

Let’s start with our steps to scrape Instagram.

1- Navigate to the Dashboard and click on the Datasets & Web Scraper IDE section.

2- Once, you are there, click on My Scrapers.

Here, you need to click on “Develop a web scraper(IDE)”. Here we will create our scraper for Instagram.

3-Now, we need to develop a new web scraper. Just for this example, I choose to scrape the “NASA” account. This is just for the sake of this example.

So, my code will look like this:

/ Click the 'play' button in the top right to run this code:

// 1. Go to the page where you want to start
navigate('https://www.instagram.com/nasa/');

// 2. Add anything else you need to do on the page.

// For example: (see the help box for all command docs).

// click('.some-button')

// type('.some-input', 'shoes')

// wait('.some-lazy-loaded-element')

// 3. Once the browser page has the data you want, call parse() to get the data

// and call collect() to add a record to your final dataset

let data = parse();

collect({

url: new URL(location.href),

title: "Nasa Account",

links: data.links,

});

You need to click the ‘play’ button in the top right to run this code.

4- Now, we will have an output.

Managing Scraping Problems

Instagram posts with the “show more button” might be difficult for scrapers to capture. However, Instagram scrapers from Bright Data are made to handle such complexity successfully. These scrapers have cutting-edge skills to traverse through the pagination and loading of additional buttons.

Bright Data’s Instagram scrapers effectively handle these difficulties to enable thorough data extraction, enabling you to collect the whole collection of information required for your analysis or study.

You can get around the challenges presented by Instagram posts’ dynamic nature by utilizing these scraping tools.

c. Pre-collected Dataset

Bright Data understands that not everyone wants to run their scraper. They supply a pre-collected dataset for Instagram to appeal to such consumers.

This dataset offers a wealth of useful information, such as followers, profiles, posts, and more.

Bright Data offers customization options to personalize the dataset to your needs, whether you want a whole dataset or a subset of specialized data. This approach avoids constructing and managing a scraper, giving you ready-to-use data for analysis and insights.

Now, let’s check the infrastructure that makes these tools so effective: the proxy infrastructure and Web Unlocker.

Unleash the Power of Proxies

Using proxies is crucial during web scraping to guarantee that your actions go unnoticed.

Bright Data provides a wide selection of proxy services that are customized to your requirements. You can pick from Residential Proxies, which offer more than 72 million IPs rotated from real-peer devices in 195 nations.

You can choose ISP Proxies, which offer 700,000+ real home IPs worldwide for long-term use; Datacenter Proxies, which have 770,000+ shared IPs from any geolocation; and Mobile Proxies, which form the largest real-peer 3G/4G mobile network with 7,000,000+ IPs.

With the use of these proxies, one can easily collect data while posing as an authorized user in numerous places.

Proxy Manager: Make Proxy Management Easier

Managing several proxies might be difficult, but Proxy Manager makes it easy.

This open-source interface enables you to manage all of your proxies from a single platform. Say goodbye to manually setting and switching proxies. Proxy Manager simplifies the procedure and saves you time and effort.

Proxy Browser Extension: Change Your Location Easily

Do you need to collect web data from several regions? You’re covered by our Proxy Browser Extension. You can change your browsing location with a single click to obtain region-specific information.

Take advantage of the flexibility and simplicity of collecting data from several regions without any technological complications.

How Does It Work? – Tutorial

 

You can locate your Scraping Browser login information on the Access parameters page, which will be utilized when you start a new browser session.

Check out documentation and code samples, including a fully functional example script that is ready to use, or watch a brief starting instruction video. For example; here is a Python code example for integration:

Want assistance? For a conversation with one of the specialists, you can click the chat icon.

Keep in mind that you have complete control over the browser sessions while using Scraping Browser and can carry out any operation that is supported by Puppeteer, Playwright, or direct Chrome DevTools Protocol use.

Website Unlocking Without Blocks

Scraping Browser is made to operate at scale and as needed. You don’t need to worry about getting banned; you can start up as many browser sessions as you need.

This capacity, when paired with the strength of proxies, guarantees continuous data gathering, enabling you to effectively obtain the data you want.

Scraping Browser’s built-in unlocking skills and robust proxy network help you save time, enhance productivity, and discover new opportunities.
You can also check the statistics from the same page directly.

Pricing of Scraping Browser

Bright Data provides customizable pricing choices to meet a variety of purposes. You can choose either a monthly or annual billing period.

The Pay as You Go option allows you to pay just for what you use, with no commitment necessary, beginning at $20.00/GB and $0.1/hour.

The $500 Growth plan is suitable for growing businesses, with a discounted fee of $15.30/GB and $0.1/hour.

The Business package, which costs $1000, is the most popular option, with the Scraping Browser API costing $13.50/GB and $0.1/hour.

By contacting the Bright Data team directly, enterprise users can enjoy infinite scaling and personalized pricing. Start a free trial today to discover the potential of Bright Data’s Scraping Browser and change your online scraping efforts.

Website Unlocker

Web Unlocker is a potent tool created to get beyond website restrictions and provide easy data harvesting. It overcomes several challenges, including cookies, site-specific browser user agents, and captcha solutions, by utilizing automated procedures.

By using automatic IP address rotation, users of Web Unlocker may continually scrape target websites, assuring constant access to important data.