A tool to crawl Instagram user accounts

made for a workshop at Burg Giebichenstein Halle/Saale.

Before Usage

You need your own credentials incl. an access token to use this tool. Please refer to on of the many pages explaining how to get these, e.g. here

All functionality is available from the commandline:

npm run timeline <username> crawls a user's entire history. the workflow will try to save intermediate results in case of errors and look for available data and pick up where it has stopped earlier
npm run images <path-to-username-timeline-json> path/file format should be in the form .json. the script will attempt to download all standard resolution images given for media. it will check if the files already exist before attempting to download them
npm run stats <path-to-username-timeline-json> <stat-name> will export the given stat found in a timeline archive to csv with the following information: media_id, formatted date string, stat. the following stats are available so far: num_likes (export like count per media), num_comments (export comment count per media), locations (export locations in the format lat:lon per media). use them like this: npm run stats downloads/username.json num_likes