I was sent a link to an instagram site where I could find what hotdog I was. But on Instagram you cannot search by plaintext comments! Was I really expected to scroll through the entire published body of work to find what hotdog I was?
Instead of wasting my time, I pieced together a simple Instagram post indexer with Python and Selenium, then dumped the resulting json data into a searchable site. The instagram scrape functionality is built on top of the work done by https://github.com/jnawjux/web_scraping_corgis.
- Installation: Clone this repo and cd into it. Make sure geckodriver the Firefox Selenium Driver is executable in project path.
- Edit the scrape.py file with your desired account names and post counts.
- Run
python scrape.pyto run the scraper(s). - After getting the JSON data you can import into whatever search you want!
JSON format = {"link": "<instagram_post_link>", "name": <name_from_comment>}