Instagram Reels Scraper

Answer the question every short-form team actually has: how are my competitors' reels performing, and what are they doing differently?

Give it a list of public Instagram accounts. It reads each account's Reels tab and returns every reel with its play count, likes, comments, caption, hashtags, duration, audio track and a direct MP4 URL — plus one summary row per account with average plays, median plays, plays per follower, engagement rate and reels per week.

No login. No cookies. No session tokens to paste. Nothing to configure beyond the list of accounts.

What you can do with it

• Benchmark a competitor set. Run ten accounts and sort the summary rows by plays per follower to see who is actually punching above their audience size.
• Find what works. Sort reels by play count and read the captions, hooks, hashtags and lengths behind the top performers.
• Track posting cadence. reelsPerWeek and newestReelAt show who is publishing daily and who has gone quiet.
• Spot trending audio. Every reel carries the audio asset id, so you can group reels by track and rank sounds by adoption and plays.
• Catch sponsored reels. isSponsored flags the paid-partnership label — the single most valuable field for ad-intelligence work.
• Build creator shortlists. Filter with minPlays to keep only accounts and reels above a performance floor.
• Archive the media. videoUrl is a direct, publicly fetchable MP4; thumbnailUrl is the cover frame.

What you get

One row per reel, plus an optional summary row per account. Real output, abridged (long CDN URLs truncated):

{
  "type": "reel",
  "id": "3948507321457537241",
  "shortcode": "DbL6n0ggXDZ",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbL6n0ggXDZ/",
  "ownerUsername": "nasa",
  "ownerId": "528817151",
  "ownerFullName": "NASA",
  "ownerIsVerified": true,
  "ownerProfileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
  "caption": "Sound on!\n\nSonifications take images from across the universe and turn them into music…\n\n#NASA #Space #MusicLife",
  "hashtags": ["NASA", "Space", "MusicLife"],
  "mentions": ["nasachandraxray"],
  "takenAt": "2026-07-24T18:46:42.000Z",
  "takenAtTimestamp": 1784918802,
  "playsCount": 11374367,
  "likesCount": 429496,
  "commentsCount": 1948,
  "interactionsCount": 431444,
  "likesPerPlayPercent": 3.776,
  "videoDuration": 34.004,
  "countsHidden": false,
  "commentsDisabled": null,
  "hasAudio": true,
  "isSponsored": false,
  "thumbnailUrl": "https://instagram.f…/753557824_18630272896049152_…jpg?…",
  "thumbnailUrls": ["…8 renditions, largest first…"],
  "videoUrl": "https://instagram.f…/AQPmdAz9D4QKeO_…mp4?…",
  "videoUrls": ["…"],
  "width": 1080,
  "height": 1080,
  "coauthors": [],
  "audioAssetId": "27398485943186432",
  "audioTitle": "Original audio",
  "audioArtist": "nasa",
  "isOriginalAudio": true,
  "productType": "clips",
  "mediaType": "reel",
  "source": "reels-tab",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-07-27T18:12:04.881Z"
}

And the account summary row that goes with it (the statistics below describe a short two-reel sample, so you can check the arithmetic against the reel above):

{
  "type": "profile",
  "username": "nasa",
  "userId": "528817151",
  "fullName": "NASA",
  "followersCount": 104292683,
  "followingCount": 91,
  "postsCount": 4859,
  "reelsCountReported": 171,
  "isVerified": true,
  "categoryName": "Government Agencies",
  "reelsScraped": 2,
  "totalPlays": 16656091,
  "avgPlays": 8328046,
  "medianPlays": 8328045.5,
  "maxPlays": 11374367,
  "avgLikes": 256666,
  "avgComments": 1275,
  "avgVideoDuration": 47.01,
  "playsPerFollower": 0.0799,
  "engagementRatePercent": 0.2473,
  "reelsPerWeek": 1.8,
  "newestReelAt": "2026-07-24T18:46:42.000Z",
  "oldestReelAt": "2026-07-20T21:16:30.000Z",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
  "reelsTabUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/reels/"
}

Input

Field	Type	Default	What it does
usernames	array	["nasa"]	Accounts to scrape. A username (nasa), an @handle, or a full profile URL — including a /reels/ tab URL. Any mix.
reelUrls	array	[]	Individual reels to scrape, independent of the accounts above. Accepts /reel/, /p/ and /tv/ URLs or a bare shortcode.
maxReelsPerProfile	integer	30	Reels to keep per account. Instagram serves 12 per page, so this rounds up to whole pages. 0 returns only the summary row.
onlyReelsNewerThan	string	""	Keep reels published on or after this date. Absolute (2026-01-31) or relative (3 months, 6 weeks, 90 days).
minPlays	integer	0	Skip reels below this play count.
minLikes	integer	0	Skip reels below this like count.
sortBy	select	newest	newest = Instagram's own order. mostPlayed = ranked by plays, within the reels this run collected.
includeProfileRecord	boolean	true	Push the account summary row with the performance statistics.
maxConcurrency	integer	3	Accounts worked on in parallel.
proxyCountry	string	us	Two-letter country code for the requests.

Output fields

Reel rows (type: "reel")

Field	Type	Notes
id	string	Numeric media id.
shortcode / url	string	DbL6n0ggXDZ and the canonical /reel/ permalink.
ownerUsername / ownerId / ownerFullName / ownerIsVerified / ownerProfileUrl		The author. On a collab reel the co-authors are in coauthors.
caption	string	Full caption text, newlines intact.
hashtags / mentions	array	Parsed out of the caption, de-duplicated, no #/@.
takenAt / takenAtTimestamp	string / number	ISO-8601 UTC and the raw unix seconds.
playsCount	number	Plays / views. null when Instagram did not report it (see limits).
likesCount / commentsCount	number	interactionsCount is their sum.
likesPerPlayPercent	number	Likes as a percentage of plays, 3 decimals — the standard short-form performance ratio.
videoDuration	number	Seconds, fractional.
countsHidden	boolean	true when the creator hid likes and views, so the counts above are unreliable.
commentsDisabled / hasAudio	boolean	null when the route does not report the flag.
isSponsored	boolean	Paid-partnership label. null — never false — when the route carries no such flag.
thumbnailUrl / thumbnailUrls	string / array	Cover frame; the array is every rendition, largest first.
videoUrl / videoUrls	string / array	Direct MP4, no auth needed. Signed and time-limited.
width / height	number	Source dimensions.
audioAssetId	string	Group reels by this to rank sounds.
audioTitle / audioArtist	string	Track title and artist for licensed audio; Instagram's "Original audio" label and the creator's handle for original audio.
isOriginalAudio	boolean	true original, false licensed, null not reported.
productType / mediaType	string	Always clips / reel for reel rows.
source	string	Which route produced the row: reels-tab, timeline-scan, profile-preview, single-reel or oembed-partial.

Account summary rows (type: "profile")

username, userId, fullName, profileUrl, reelsTabUrl, biography, externalUrl, profilePicUrl, followersCount, followingCount, postsCount, reelsCountReported, isVerified, isPrivate, isBusinessAccount, categoryName, businessEmail, businessPhoneNumber, plus the statistics: reelsScraped, totalPlays, avgPlays, medianPlays, maxPlays, avgLikes, avgComments, avgVideoDuration, playsPerFollower, engagementRatePercent, reelsPerWeek, newestReelAt, oldestReelAt.

Every statistic is a sample figure describing the reels this run collected — not a lifetime total. A run capped at 30 reels describes those 30. Counts Instagram declined to report are left out of the averages instead of being counted as zero.

FAQ

Do I need an Instagram account, cookies or a session id? No. Everything comes from Instagram's own public, logged-out endpoints.

How many reels can I get from one account? As many as the account has, subject to rate limiting. Pagination has no ceiling of its own — a verified run walked 9 consecutive pages with zero duplicates and no end in sight. The practical limit is Instagram's throttling, which is why the actor keeps partial results instead of discarding them.

Can I get comments on the reels? Not with this actor.

Why is playsCount null on some rows? Either the reel came from a route that does not report it (source tells you), or the creator hid their view counts (countsHidden: true). It is never a silent zero — a zero in this dataset means zero.

What happens if an account is private or does not exist? A private account gets a summary row marked isPrivate: true and no reels. A handle that does not exist is logged as a failure and skipped; one bad entry never stops the run.

Can I paste photo or carousel URLs into reelUrls? You can, but they are skipped with a warning. This actor returns reels only.

Does it work on accounts with pinned reels? Yes. Pinned reels appear first regardless of date; the date filter accounts for that and does not cut the walk short on them.