CrowdPull Instagram Scraper

Scrape public Instagram profiles, posts, reels, direct post URLs, comments, hashtag search results, hashtag feeds, place search results, place feeds, and tagged mentions with a single Apify actor.

The actor is designed to mirror the CrowdPull Facebook actors:

• HTTP-first, not browser-first
• structured Apify schemas and PPR event names
• optional Smart Scrape dedup caches for recurring monitoring
• explicit “no login” vs “session cookie” mode boundaries

Modes

No login required

• profiles — profile metadata like full name, bio, follower counts, verification, category, links, highlight count, and profile images
• posts — recent profile posts and reels, plus optional profile metadata row
• postUrls — scrape individual post or reel URLs through Instagram’s embed payload

Session cookie required

• comments — full comment bodies, usernames, timestamps, likes, and child comment counts require sessionCookie
• searchPlaces — search Instagram places/locations by keyword and return location metadata rows
• placePosts — scrape place metadata plus recent public posts for Instagram location IDs or place URLs

Public fallback, better with sessionCookie

• searchHashtags — tries Instagram's public popular-search surface when logged out, with fuller results when sessionCookie is provided
• hashtagPosts — falls back to public popular-search media when logged out, with fuller hashtag feed coverage when sessionCookie is provided
• mentions — best-effort on public profile data, but availability improves with sessionCookie

Core Features

• Public profile and post extraction without login for the main modes
• Reels, videos, images, and carousels from the same actor
• Profile rows with follower/following/post counts
• Place search rows with location IDs, names, slugs, addresses, cities, coordinates, and media counts
• Rich post rows with captions, hashtags, mentions, tagged users, coauthors, locations, music metadata, pinned state, engagement counts, and media URLs
• Date filtering with ISO or relative inputs like 7d, 30d, 6m, 1y, or 14 days
• Smart Scrape caches for recurring runs
• Source-by-source diagnostics so empty or partial results are explained instead of silently returning nothing
• Continues past individual bad usernames, URLs, or hashtags instead of aborting the whole batch
• Remote-ready pricing events that map directly to visible profile, post, comment, hashtag, and Smart Scrape actions
• Optional Apify Residential Proxy support for more stable pagination

Input Examples

Profile posts

{
  "mode": "posts",
  "usernames": ["nasa", "natgeo"],
  "maxPosts": 20,
  "includeProfile": true,
  "enableDedup": true,
  "refreshWindowDays": 7
}

Direct post URLs

{
  "mode": "postUrls",
  "postUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/C5_2_NORRg3/" }
  ]
}

Authenticated comments

{
  "mode": "comments",
  "postUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/C5_2_NORRg3/" }
  ],
  "maxComments": 100,
  "sessionCookie": "sessionid=..."
}

Instagram place feed

{
  "mode": "placePosts",
  "placeUrls": [
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/212988663/detroit-michigan/" }
  ],
  "maxPosts": 10,
  "sessionCookie": "sessionid=..."
}

Smart Scrape

Enable enableDedup to persist a per-source cache of post IDs:

• posts caches by username
• postUrls caches by URL
• hashtagPosts caches by hashtag
• searchPlaces caches place result IDs by search term
• placePosts caches by location ID
• mentions caches by username

Use refreshWindowDays to re-fetch recent cached posts so likes and comment counts stay current.

Output

• Results are written to the default dataset
• Run-level and source-level diagnostics are written to the default key-value store
• Diagnostics help distinguish succeeded, partial, empty, and failed sources in larger batch runs

Notes

• Instagram’s private web endpoints rate limit aggressively; residential proxies improve consistency for deeper pagination
• Full comment extraction still requires a valid sessionCookie
• Instagram place search and place feeds currently require a valid sessionCookie
• Logged-out hashtag and mention fallbacks come from Instagram's public surfaces, so they are less complete and more volatile than authenticated results
• Private, removed, region-restricted, or otherwise withheld Instagram sources can still return empty results

Build

npm install
npm run build