Instagram Ingest Scraper

An Apify Actor that downloads an Instagram reel, post, or carousel, transcribes any video with faster-whisper, and returns structured metadata + media so an AI agent can extract the real text and file it somewhere (Notion, in the companion project below).

This Actor only does the scrape + transcribe step — it does not interpret content or write anywhere itself. It's built to be driven by an AI agent over the Apify MCP server, typically the instagram-ingest-apify Claude Code plugin, though nothing here is Claude-specific — any MCP client (or the plain Apify API) can call it.

Input

Output

One dataset item per run:

{
  "shortcode": "Da5lLU3y3h9",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/Da5lLU3y3h9/",
  "type": "reel",
  "author": "someuser",
  "caption": "...",
  "posted_at": "2026-07-17 15:54:02",
  "likes": 705,
  "page_count": 1,
  "has_video": true,
  "transcript": "[01.mp4]\n...",
  "pages": [{"index": 1, "kind": "video", "kvsKey": "01.mp4"}],
  "frames": []
}

• transcript is a plain string (or null) — already usable as-is, no file fetch needed.
• Each pages entry's kvsKey points to the actual downloaded media file in this run's Key-Value Store. Fetch it with get-key-value-store-record (Apify MCP) or the REST API — either way you get back a signed URL good for a direct, unauthenticated download.
• frames is always an empty array for compatibility. Extract frames locally from the original MP4 referenced by the pages entry instead of uploading JPEGs to Apify.

Why cookies are needed

Instagram blocks anonymous scraping. Export cookies from a logged-in (ideally burner) account via the Cookie-Editor browser extension → Export as Netscape. Either pass that content as the cookies input on each call, or set it once as the IG_COOKIES environment variable in this Actor's own Settings (Apify Console) if you're running your own deployment of it.

Local development

python -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt   # .venv\Scripts\pip on Windows
echo '{"instagramUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/reel/XXXXXXXXX/"}' > storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json
IG_COOKIES="$(cat /path/to/cookies.txt)" .venv/bin/python -m my_actor

Deploy with the Apify CLI:

apify login
apify push

License

MIT — see LICENSE.