Instagram Stories Scraper: live stories and pinned highlights from public profiles

Name up to five public Instagram handles and get their stories back as rows. Media type, the image or video link, when it was posted, the caption, any location tag, and the sponsored flag.

Here is the thing that decides whether this is useful to you. A story is gone 24 hours after it goes up, so a run only sees what is live at the moment you press Start. If you want the older material, that is what highlights are: the trays an account pins to its profile, which do not expire. They are switched on by default.

Input	Up to 5 public handles, @handles or profile URLs
Output	One row per story or highlight item
Ceiling	100 rows per profile, 5 profiles per run
Account needed	None from you
Price	$2.50 per 1,000 rows, flat on every plan

🔍 What Instagram Stories Scraper does

It reads what is live on each handle right now, plus the pinned highlight trays if you leave those on, and writes one row per item. Stories and highlights come back in the same shape, and recordType tells you which you are looking at. Highlight rows also carry the tray they came from in highlightTitle.

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

maxStoriesPerProfile is applied to current stories and to highlights separately. Set it to 25 and a profile with both can return up to 50 rows, and you pay per row. Set it low while you are working out how much a handle actually has.

If you do supply your own cookie in sessionCookies, the run uses your account's own rate limit, and it returns current stories only. Highlights come back on the default route.

📥 What you give it

{
  "profiles": ["nasa", "natgeo"],
  "maxStoriesPerProfile": 25,
  "includeHighlights": true
}

Field	Default	What it is
profiles	none	nasa, @nasa or a full profile URL. Up to 5 in one run.
maxStoriesPerProfile	25	Rows per profile, 1 to 100, counted separately for current stories and for highlights.
includeHighlights	true	The pinned trays. Untick it to get only what is live today. A profile with nothing pinned simply returns nothing extra.
maxRunSeconds	120	Wall-clock ceiling for the whole run, 20 to 180.
requestTimeoutSeconds	15	How long one request may take, 5 to 30.
maxAttempts	6	How many times a refused request is retried before the run gives up on it. 1 to 12.
sessionCookies	none	Optional. Your own Instagram sessionid, for your own rate limit. Current stories only on this route.
proxyConfiguration	Apify default	Leave it alone. Put servers of your own in proxyUrls inside it if you have them.

Start a run with no profiles and you get one labelled sample row showing the output shape. That row is not charged.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run, with the long media links cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "story",
  "storyId": "3978846251986655690",
  "sourceUsername": "nasa",
  "sourceProfileId": "528817151",
  "ownerUsername": "nasa",
  "mediaType": "video",
  "takenAt": "2026-09-04T15:23:44.000Z",
  "expiresAt": null,
  "caption": null,
  "imageUrl": "https://scontent-xxc1-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-15/...",
  "videoUrl": "https://scontent-xxc1-1.cdninstagram.com/o1/v/t2/f2/m78/...",
  "durationSeconds": 15,
  "dimensions": null,
  "isSponsored": false,
  "location": null,
  "storyUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/stories/nasa/3978846251986655690/"
}

A highlight row is the same shape with recordType: "highlight" and two extra fields, highlightId and highlightTitle, naming the tray it was pinned into.

Field	What it is
storyId	Unique per item. Use it as your dedupe key across runs.
mediaType	image, video or carousel. A video row carries both imageUrl (the cover frame) and videoUrl.
imageUrl, videoUrl	Signed links that expire within hours. Download anything you want to keep, in the same job.
takenAt	When the item was posted. null when Instagram did not supply it, never a made-up date.
expiresAt, dimensions	Frequently null. They arrive when Instagram sends them and are left empty when it does not, so do not build on them.
location	An object with the place id, name, address and coordinates when the item carries a location sticker. null otherwise.
isSponsored	Instagram's own paid-partnership flag on the item.

Nothing is guessed or padded.

🧾 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 story or a highlight item	ok: true and a storyId	yes
The sample row	_sample: true, and only on a run with no profiles	no
A diagnostic	ok: false and an errorCode	no

Filter on ok == true and you have your media. Every diagnostic row names the handle it belongs to in sourceUsername, so you always know which profile it is about.

Code	What it means
NO_CURRENT_STORIES	Nothing was live on that profile at the moment of the run.
NOT_FOUND	No such account.
PRIVATE_OR_RESTRICTED	The account is private, or closed to a reader who is not following it.
BAD_INPUT	Nothing in profiles looked like a handle.
PARTIAL	The run delivered some rows and then stopped. What arrived is complete and correct.
DEADLINE_EXCEEDED	The run hit maxRunSeconds before reaching that profile. Raise it.
RATE_LIMITED	Too many requests too close together. Space the runs out.
AUTHENTICATION_FAILED, SESSION_EXHAUSTED	If you supplied a cookie, check it is still valid.
PROXY_GROUP_IGNORED	A setting in proxyConfiguration could not be used as written.
SERVER_ERROR, NETWORK	Instagram was unreachable or answered badly. Re-run it.

No diagnostic row is billed as a result.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Stories Scraper and click Try for free.
2. Put your handles into Public Instagram profiles, up to five.
3. Set Maximum current stories per profile. Start at 5 while you look at the output shape.
4. Leave Also get story highlights on if you want the older pinned material.
5. Click Start, then download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel.

💰 How much does it cost?

$2.50 per 1,000 rows. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One charge per row delivered, whether it is a live story or a highlight item. Sample rows and diagnostic rows are not billed, and a profile with nothing live is not billed for results.

Remember the cap counts twice, once for current stories and once for highlights. A five-profile run at 25 can come back with 250 rows rather than 125 if every profile has both.

💡 What people use it for

• Checking daily whether a set of brands is running stories, and archiving them before they vanish.
• Pulling a competitor's highlight trays as a snapshot of how they present themselves.
• Collecting story links and sponsored flags to see which creators are running paid placements.
• Keeping a record of a campaign's stories, since nobody can go back for them the next day.

🚧 What it does not do

• No expired stories. Once the 24 hours are up the item is gone, and highlights are the only way back to older material.
• No private accounts, and no accounts that only show stories to followers.
• No viewer lists, no reply counts, no poll or quiz results. Those are visible only to the account that posted.
• Highlights need the default route. Supply your own cookie and you get current stories only.
• expiresAt and dimensions are often empty, so do not build a pipeline that requires them.
• Media links expire within hours. Download the files in the same job.
• Five profiles per run, 100 rows per profile on each of the two kinds.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

If you want	Use
Live stories and pinned highlights	This one
Posts and reels from a profile	Instagram Scraper
Follower counts, bio, email and links	Instagram Profile Scraper
Reels from a profile's reels tab	Instagram Reel Scraper
Posts other people made about a handle	Instagram Mentions Scraper

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an Instagram account? No. The cookie field is optional and gives you a rate limit nobody else shares.

Why did I get nothing back? Most likely nobody had a story live at that moment. The NO_CURRENT_STORIES row in your dataset says so, and it is not billed.

Can I get stories from yesterday? Only if the account pinned them into a highlight. Instagram deletes the rest after 24 hours.

Can the account see that I read its story? No. Nothing is viewed as an account, so nothing turns up in its viewer list.

How often should I schedule it? Every few hours if you want to catch everything, since stories come and go inside a day.

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.

🆘 If something breaks

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