Insta LocTrack

A SOCMINT project I made this week for an OSINT course I had.

Goal of the project

The goal of this project is to collect all the locations linked to the photos of an Instagram profile in order to place them on a map.

I doesn't use Instagram's API since Instagram deprecated its location functionality in 2018, and also because I wanted to play with Selenium and Chromedriver to make my own scraper.

requirements

sudo apt install chromium-chromedriver && sudo pip install -r requirements

Usage

python3 InstaLocTrack.py -h
usage: InstaLocTrack [-h] [-t TARGET_ACCOUNT] [-l LOGIN] [-p PASSWORD] [-v]

Instagram location data gathering tool. Usage: python3 InstaLocTrack.py -t <target_account>

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -t TARGET_ACCOUNT, --target TARGET_ACCOUNT
                        Instagram profile to investigate
  -l LOGIN, --login LOGIN
                        Instagram profile to connect to, in order to access
                        the instagram posts of the target account
  -p PASSWORD, --password PASSWORD
                        Password of the Instagram profile to connect to
  -v, --visual          Spawns Chromium GUI, otherwise Chromium is headless

How it works

First, we retrieve all the pictures links of the account by scrolling the whole Instagram profile, thanks to selenium's webdriver.

Then, we retrieve asynchronously (asyncio) each picture link, we check if it contains a location in the picture description, and retrieve the location's data if there's one, and the timestamp.

NB: Since 2018 Instagram deprecated its location API and it's not possible anymore to get the GPS coordinates of a picture, all we can retrieve is the name of the location. (If you can prove me that I'm wrong about this, please tell me!)

Because Instagram doesn't provide GPS coordinates, and we're only given names of places, we have to geocode these (.ie. get the GPS coords from the name's place).

For this, I used Nominatim's awesome API, which uses OpenStreetMap. For our usage, no API key is required, and we respect Nominatim's usage Policy by requesting GPS coordinatess once every second.

Eventually, once we have all the GPS coordinatess, we generate a HTML page with Javascript embedded that plots a Google Map with all our locations pinned. Once again, no API key is required for this step. For this final step, I have to thank Tania Rascia's project which provides such a feature.

Also, the data collected by the script (location names, timestamps, GPS coordinates) are dumped to a JSON file in order to be re-used, so are errors encountered.

Example

As an example, here's the output on the former French President's Instagram profile, @fhollande :

Information available when clicking on a marker:

The JSON data dump (just a part of it to show the format for a given location):

{
    "link": "https://www.instagram.com/p/-Q_9EvR9eu",
    "place": {
      "id": "290297",
      "name": "Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac",
      "slug": "musee-du-quai-branly-jacques-chirac",
      "street_address": " 37 quai Branly",
      " zip_code": " 75007",
      " city_name": " Paris",
      " region_name": " ",
      " country_code": " FR"
    },
    "timestamp": "2015-11-19",
    "gps": {
      "lat": "48.8566969",
      "lon": "2.3514616"
    }
  }

Possible Improvements

Cleaner code :D
Use OOP programming rather than lists and indexes
Check password correctness with -p flag
Correct ISO Code for some countries: Nominatim doesn't considers French Polynesia's ISO code as valid for some reason ¯\(ツ)/¯
Asynchronous Webdriver : arsenic ?
best way to provide fast results : requests asynchronously?
Provide statistics about the location data (most visited place, heatmap, diagrams ...)
Interactive dashboard instead of static html/JS output
Better Geocoding :
- Get GPS coords from Instagram's location ID ... doesn't work asynchronously at the moment, gotta check for the timeout settings
- Retry Geocoding when it fails because of the first field: happens when it's too precise, then the location of the city rather than the exact place would be better than just an error imo.
- Use other geocoding tools (e.g. https://geo.api.gouv.fr/adresse) than Nominatim when it fails? (specify arg?)
Add an argument to select only a set of pictures (selected by date, or rank)
Use GeoJSON WGS-84 (EPSG 4326) format
Time information about the duration of the script
The whole Instagram profile isn't scrolled if your connection is slow ... maybe gonna add a parameter to correct this