codesnippets.rst.txt

Advanced Instaloader Examples

.. currentmodule:: instaloader

Contents

• Download Posts in a Specific Period
• Likes of a Profile / Ghost Followers
• Track Deleted Posts
• Only one Post per User
• Top X Posts of User
• Metadata JSON Files

Here we present code examples that use the :ref:`python-module-instaloader` for more advanced Instagram downloading or metadata mining than what is possible with the Instaloader command line interface.

The scripts presented here can be downloaded from our source tree: instaloader/docs/codesnippets/

Download Posts in a Specific Period

To only download Instagram pictures (and metadata) that are within a specific period, you can simply use :func:`~itertools.dropwhile` and :func:`~itertools.takewhile` from :mod:`itertools` on a generator that returns Posts in exact chronological order, such as :meth:`Profile.get_posts`.

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/121_since_until.py

See also :class:`Post`, :meth:`Instaloader.download_post`.

Discussed in :issue:`121`.

The code example with :func:`~itertools.dropwhile` and :func:`~itertools.takewhile` makes the assumption that the post iterator returns posts in exact chronological order. As discussed in :issue:`666`, the following approach fits for an almost chronological order, where up to k older posts are inserted into an otherwise chronological order, such as a Hashtag feed.

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/666_historical_hashtag_data.py

Likes of a Profile / Ghost Followers

To obtain a list of your inactive followers, i.e. followers that did not like any of your pictures, you can use this approach.

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/120_ghost_followers.py

See also :meth:`Profile.get_posts`, :meth:`Post.get_likes`, :meth:`Profile.get_followers`, :meth:`Instaloader.load_session_from_file`, :meth:`Profile.from_username`.

Discussed in :issue:`120`.

Track Deleted Posts

This script uses Instaloader to obtain a list of currently-online Instagram and compares it with the set of posts that you already have downloaded. It outputs a list of posts which are online but not offline (i.e. not yet downloaded) and a list of posts which are offline but not online (i.e. deleted in the profile).

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/56_track_deleted.py

See also :func:`load_structure_from_file`, :meth:`Profile.from_username`, :meth:`Profile.get_posts`, :class:`Post`.

Discussed in :issue:`56`.

Only one Post per User

To download only the single most recent post per user within a hashtag feed, this snippet uses a :class:`set` that contains the users of whom a post has already been downloaded. For each post, it checks whether the post's creator is already contained in that set. If not, the post is downloaded from Instagram and the user is added to that set.

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/113_only_one_per_user.py

See also :class:`Post`, :meth:`Instaloader.download_post`, :attr:`Post.owner_profile`, :class:`Profile`.

Discussed in :issue:`113`.

Top X Posts of User

With Instaloader, it is easy to download the few most-liked pictures of a user.

.. literalinclude:: codesnippets/194_top_x_of_user.py

Discussed in :issue:`194`.

Metadata JSON Files

The JSON files Instaloader saves along with each Post contain all the metadata that has been retrieved from Instagram while downloading the picture and associated required information.

With jq, a command-line JSON processor, the metadata can be easily post-processed. For example, Instaloader's JSON files can be pretty-formatted with:

xzcat 2018-05-13_11-18-45_UTC.json.xz | jq .node

However, Instaloader tries to do as few metadata requests as possible, so, depending on how Instaloader has been invoked, it may occur that these files do not contain the complete available metadata structure. Nevertheless, the file can be loaded into Instaloader with :func:`load_structure_from_file` and the required metadata then be accessed via the :class:`Post` or :class:`Profile` attributes, which trigger an Instagram request if that particular information is not present in the JSON file.