📸 Instagram Story Scraper

Pull live (24-hour) Instagram stories for any public profile and get back the full, structured story payload — video & image versions, music, stickers, links, mentions, engagement flags, and optional on-image caption text (OCR). Feed it bare usernames, @handles, or full profile URLs in bulk and watch results stream into your dataset in real time.

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✨ Why Choose This Actor?

• 🧱 Complete data — nothing stripped. Every field Instagram returns for a story is preserved, in a clean canonical order.
• 👤 Any input format — natgeo, @kyliejenner, instagram.com/taylorswift, or https://www.instagram.com/therock/. Mix and match, in bulk.
• 🛡️ Self-healing proxy ladder — starts direct, auto-escalates to datacenter, then a sticky residential proxy only when needed. Clear logs at every step.
• 📝 OCR captions — optionally reads text burned into the story frame (titles, stickers, mentions) into extractedCaption.
• 💾 Live saving — each story is pushed the moment it's ready, so a partial run never loses data.
• 🗂️ Six ready-made table views — slice results by Media, Images, Music, Stickers, Engagement, or a quick Overview.

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🔑 Key Features

Feature	Description
📋 Bulk input	Scrape many profiles in one run
🎬 Full media	video_versions, video_dash_manifest, codecs, qualities, dimensions
🖼️ Image versions	Every cover-frame candidate resolution
🎵 Music	music_metadata enriched from story music stickers
🔗 Stickers & links	Link stickers, feed-media stickers, mentions, reshares
⏱️ CDN expiry enrichment	Fills url_expiration_timestamp_us from CDN oe= when missing
📝 OCR caption	Optional extractedCaption per story

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📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Description
usernames	array	✅	Usernames or profile URLs (bulk).
sessionId	string	✅	Your Instagram sessionid cookie (stories are login-gated).
extractCaptionText	boolean	➖	Enable OCR caption extraction. Default false.
proxyConfiguration	object	➖	Proxy settings. Default: direct with auto-fallback.

Example

{
  "usernames": ["therock", "@kyliejenner", "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"],
  "sessionId": "REDACTED_SESSIONID_COOKIE",
  "extractCaptionText": false,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": false }
}

🍪 Where to get sessionId: Log into Instagram in your browser → DevTools → Application → Cookies → instagram.com → sessionid. Treat it like a password.

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📤 Output

Each dataset item is one story with the full Instagram payload. Abridged example:

{
  "scraped_username": "therock",
  "id": "3920998746292350747_232192182",
  "pk": "3920998746292350747",
  "code": "DZqL5Xdge8b",
  "taken_at": 1781637893,
  "expiring_at": 1781724293,
  "media_type": 2,
  "product_type": "story",
  "video_duration": 60.04,
  "has_audio": true,
  "video_versions": [{ "width": 720, "height": 1280, "url": "https://…" }],
  "image_versions2": { "candidates": [{ "width": 1080, "height": 1920, "url": "https://…" }] },
  "music_metadata": { "music_asset_info": { "audio_asset_id": "18121840837670133" } },
  "story_link_stickers": [{ "story_link": { "url": "https://…" } }],
  "extractedCaption": ""
}

🗂️ Dataset views

View	Shows
🗂️ Overview	IDs, type, timestamps, duration, OCR caption
🎬 Media & Video	Codecs, qualities, dimensions, video versions
🖼️ Image Versions	All cover-frame candidates
🎵 Music	Music metadata & music stickers
🔗 Stickers, Links & Mentions	Link stickers, feed media, mentions, reshares
💬 Engagement & Flags	Like/reply/reshare/save flags, paid partnership

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🚀 How to Use (Apify Console)

1. Log in at https://console.apify.com → Actors.
2. Open Instagram Story Scraper.
3. Paste usernames / URLs, add your sessionId, choose proxy & OCR options.
4. Click Start.
5. Watch the logs stream live story collection.
6. Open the Output tab and switch between the six section views.
7. Export to JSON / CSV / XLSX.

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🤖 Use via API

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<ACTOR_ID>/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "usernames": ["therock", "@kyliejenner"],
        "sessionId": "YOUR_SESSIONID",
        "extractCaptionText": false
      }'

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🎯 Best Use Cases

• 📈 Monitor competitor / influencer story activity
• 🗞️ Archive brand & creator stories before they expire
• 🔗 Track link stickers, promos, and product drops
• 🎵 Analyze trending audio usage in stories

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💸 Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event: you're charged per story successfully delivered to your dataset (story-result). Profiles with no live stories cost nothing beyond the run start. The optional OCR step runs on Apify compute and is included in the run usage.

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❓ FAQ

Do I need a session cookie? Yes — stories are only visible to logged-in viewers, so a valid sessionid is required.

What if a profile has no active stories? You'll see a friendly "no live stories" log line and no items for that profile — no charge.

Will I get blocked? The actor starts direct and only escalates to datacenter then sticky residential proxies when Instagram pushes back, with backoff retries. For heavy use, enable Apify Proxy.

Why is pk sometimes huge? It's Instagram's numeric primary key, returned as-is.

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⚖️ Legal & Compliance

• Data is collected only from publicly available profiles you have the right to view.
• Do not scrape private accounts or content you aren't authorized to access.
• You are responsible for compliance with GDPR, CCPA, Instagram's ToS, and local laws.

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🛟 Support & Feedback

Found a bug or want a new field exposed? Open an issue on the actor's Issues tab — real answers, fast.