Instagram Reel Scraper: every reel on a public profile, no login

Name a public Instagram handle and get its reels tab back as rows. Play count, likes, comments, the caption with hashtags and mentions split out, duration, a direct video file, the cover image and the audio track behind the reel.

The thing that catches people out: a creator can pin reels to the top of their own tab, so the first rows are not the newest ones. Pinned reels are kept by default and flagged with isPinned, and every row carries its real publication time so you can sort however you like.

Input	Instagram handles, profile URLs or numeric profile ids
Output	One row per reel
Ceiling	1,000 reels per profile, 100 profiles per run
Account needed	None from you
Price	$0.35 per 1,000 reels, flat on every plan

🔍 What Instagram Reel Scraper does

It reads the public reels tab of the handles you name, one row per reel, and stops when it reaches your limit or your date cut-off. Several profiles are read at once, so a list of thirty handles is not thirty times slower than one.

Nothing to log into. No API key, no cookie, no app review.

Collab reels are handled properly, which matters more than it sounds. A reel published by two accounts sits on both tabs, so ownerUsername is whoever actually posted it and inputUsername is the handle you asked for. Those two differ often. The same reel found under two of your handles is delivered once, not twice.

A handful of otherwise-public accounts are closed to visitors who are not signed in. Those come back as a labelled row rather than silently empty, and your own cookie in sessionCookies is the one thing that opens them.

📥 What you give it

{
  "usernames": ["nasa", "natgeo", "https://www.instagram.com/nike/"],
  "resultsLimit": 30,
  "onlyPostsNewerThan": "3 months"
}

Field	Default	What it is
usernames	none	nasa, @nasa, a full profile URL or a numeric profile id. Mix them freely. Up to 100 per run.
resultsLimit	none, the form starts at 30	Rows per profile, 1 to 1,000. Pinned reels use these slots unless you skip them.
onlyPostsNewerThan	none	A day (2026-05-01) or a window (3 months, 2 weeks, 10 days); the form gives you a calendar. Pinned reels are checked against their real publication date too. A value that is not a date stops the run with a BAD_INPUT row before anything is read.
skipPinnedPosts	off	Drop the reels the account pinned. Leave it off to keep them, first in the list and marked with isPinned, the way the tab shows them.
maxItems	none	An overall ceiling across every handle, up to 5,000. A useful guard when you paste a long list.
sessionCookies	none	Optional. Your own sessionid (and csrftoken if you have it), for accounts that will not answer a signed-out visitor.
proxyUrls	none	Optional. Servers of your own you want the run to use, as http://user:pass@host:port.

Start a run with nothing filled in and you get one labelled sample row showing the exact output shape. That row is not charged.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run, cut down to the interesting fields. The long media links are trimmed with ..., and the caption ends with an emoji that has been cut out of this block:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "reel",
  "inputUsername": "nasa",
  "shortCode": "DdhFkS7KGkZ",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdhFkS7KGkZ/",
  "caption": "Our first Leader of the Uprising ...",
  "videoPlayCount": 5221170,
  "likesCount": 34374,
  "commentsCount": 260,
  "videoDuration": 23.381000518798828,
  "videoUrl": "https://scontent-dfw5-2.cdninstagram.com/o1/v/t2/f2/m86/...",
  "displayUrl": "https://scontent-dfw6-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-15/...",
  "audioTitle": "Original audio",
  "audioIsOriginal": true,
  "audioDurationMs": 23000,
  "ownerUsername": "ravens",
  "ownerFullName": "Baltimore Ravens",
  "ownerIsVerified": true,
  "coauthorUsernames": ["astro_reid", "nasa"],
  "mentions": ["paramountplus", "nfloncbs"],
  "hashtags": [],
  "isPinned": false,
  "isPaidPartnership": false,
  "likesAndViewCountsDisabled": false,
  "timestamp": "2026-09-20T17:20:00.000Z",
  "inputUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/reels/",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T13:01:52.724Z"
}

That row is a good example of the collab case. It was found under nasa, but the Ravens posted it and NASA is one of the co-authors.

Field	What it is
shortCode, id	Both stable. Either works as a dedupe key across runs.
videoUrl, displayUrl	Direct signed links to the video file and the cover frame. They expire within hours, so fetch them in the same job. The url field does not expire.
videoPlayCount	Plays at the moment of reading. videoViewCount carries the same number.
likesAndViewCountsDisabled, isCommentsDisabled	Tell you a missing count was switched off rather than being a real zero.
coauthorProfiles, taggedUsers, sponsorProfiles	Full objects with id, name, profile link and picture. Tagged users also carry their tag position.
audioIsOriginal	true for a sound the account made, false for a licensed track.
isPaidPartnership	Instagram's own flag. sponsorProfiles stays empty when Instagram marks the partnership but names no sponsor. Nothing is guessed from the caption.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row land in your dataset, and only the first kind is billed.

Row	How to spot it	Billed
A reel	recordType: "reel" and a shortCode	yes
The sample row	_sample: true, and only on a run with no handles	no
A diagnostic	_diagnostic: true and an errorCode	no

Filter on recordType == "reel" and you have your reels. Every row also carries a charged flag, which is how the actor labels its real rows against samples and diagnostics.

The errorCode on a diagnostic names the handle it belongs to and says what happened:

Code	What it means
BAD_INPUT	Not a handle. A single reel link is the usual cause.
NOT_FOUND	Instagram says there is no such account, or the account is private.
NOT_AVAILABLE	A real account that will not answer a signed-out visitor. Your own cookie opens it.
NO_RESULTS	A public account with no reels in the window you asked for.
LIMIT_REACHED	The run's maxItems was used up by other handles before this one's reels. Nothing was charged for it.
BLOCKED	Instagram stopped answering for that handle this time. Whatever already arrived is yours.
TIME_BUDGET	The run ran out of time before reaching that handle.
DEAD_LIST	Six handles in a row returned nothing, so the run stopped rather than work through the rest.
PROXY_INPUT_ADJUSTED	Something in proxyUrls could not be used as written.
CHARGE_ERROR, UNEXPECTED_ERROR	Something went wrong that did not fit the list above.

A bad handle never fails the run. It gets its row and the rest of your list carries on.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Reel Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Put your handles into Instagram handles, one per line.
3. Set Reels per profile. Start at 10 while you look at the output shape.
4. Click Start.
5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.35 per 1,000 reels. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One charge per reel row delivered. A reel filtered out by your date cut-off or by skipPinnedPosts never becomes a row, so it is never billed. The same reel found under two handles is billed once. Sample rows, diagnostic rows and a handle that turns out to have no reels are not billed for results.

💡 What people use it for

• Tracking a set of creators week by week, then diffing on shortCode to see what is new and how the play counts moved.
• Working out what actually lands on an account before briefing a campaign: sort by videoPlayCount and read the top ten captions.
• Building a reference library with the cover image and a playable video link already attached.
• Audio research. audioId and audioIsOriginal show which sounds an account leans on and which of them it made itself.

🚧 What it does not do

• Reels tab only. No photo posts, carousels, stories or highlights, and a single reel link is not valid input here.
• No private accounts, and no way around that.
• Counts are a snapshot. Two runs an hour apart will disagree, and both are right.
• Video and cover links expire within hours. Download what you want to keep.
• Deduplication is inside a run, not across runs. Two runs over the same handle return the same reels again.
• Six empty handles in a row stop the run early, with a DEAD_LIST row saying so. It is there to stop a list of dead handles quietly eating your time.
• No comment text, no liker lists, no follower counts. Those live in other actors.
• 100 handles and 1,000 reels per handle per run. Bigger jobs need splitting.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Reels from a profile's reels tab	This one
Everything a profile has posted	Instagram Profile Scraper
One post or reel you have the link for	Instagram Post Scraper
Reels found by keyword	Instagram Reels Search
The spoken words inside a reel	Instagram Transcript Scraper
Comments under a reel	Instagram Comments Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an account or an API key? No. Leave everything optional empty and it runs.

Then what is the cookie field for? The small number of accounts Instagram will not show to a signed-out visitor. They come back as NOT_AVAILABLE, and your own cookie is what opens them.

Why did I get a reel owned by someone else? Collab reels sit on both accounts' tabs. ownerUsername is who posted it, inputUsername is the handle you asked for.

How do I get only the newest reels? Set onlyPostsNewerThan. The run stops walking a profile once it passes your cut-off, so a daily schedule reads only what is new.

Is scraping Instagram legal? This reads public profiles only, never private accounts or messages. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Nothing carries over between runs, so the same input is safe to repeat hourly or daily.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the handles you used and the run ID. The errorCode on the diagnostic row usually explains it on its own.