Instagram-scraper
Dev tools
web scraper
SHOW HN2018
How HN took it
0 positive, 7 neutral or asking, 0 mixed, 5 critical, out of 12 comments about the project. Thread score -0.27.
Idea: 0 for, 4 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Instagram is currently easy to scrape, per a commenter
From 1 comment
If you've ever tried scraping Facebook you'd know that it's nearly impossible to do so reliably. They have a formidable anti-scrape strategy. Instagram is currently ridiculously…
katzgrau on HN
Objections
Scraping violates Instagram's terms of service and is ethically questionable
From 3 comments
curious why you are scraping instagram for this purpose and not something like flickr which has a reasonable public api and tagged creative commons licensed images that are…
nsfmc on HN> try to be considerate I understand what you're getting at, but if someone tells you explicitly not to do something (e.g. in the terms of service of their website), doing that…
michaelmior on HNWhat is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed -…
stingraycharles on HN
Scraper downloads the same few images repeatedly and does not work well
From 1 comment
Does not really work... downloads the same 5 pictures over and over again.
r0f1 on HN
Many similar scraper projects already exist
From 1 comment
There are dozens and dozens of similar projects on Github and elsewhere...
anonu on HN
Not interesting or novel enough for HN
From 1 comment
Right, this is what I was driving at. This does not belong on HN, as it is neither interesting nor novel. And it's self-promotion which, when it's also completely unimpressive,…
fapjacks on HN
Requests
Support keyword search of image categories
From 1 comment
Does it also offer ability to search categories of images with keywords?
viabary on HN
Add backoff to handle Instagram rate limiting
From 1 comment
Interesting, I might reverse engineer and see if we can introduce some kind of backoff and then resume the scraping again.
meetmangukiya on HN
Questions
What is the project's goal?
From 1 comment
That's cool - what are your goals with this project?
anonu on HN
Why scrape Instagram instead of Flickr or archive.org?
From 1 comment
curious why you are scraping instagram for this purpose and not something like flickr which has a reasonable public api and tagged creative commons licensed images that are…
nsfmc on HN
Is scraping like this legal?
From 1 comment
What is HN’s opinion on the legality of these types of scrapers? Instagram’s robots.txt disallows this kind of scraping, same for their ToS. Legal precedents have been mixed -…
stingraycharles on HN
Alternatives named
instagram-scraper by rarcega
From 1 comment
I use https://github.com/rarcega/instagram-scraper The rate limit by instagram is a bit tough, though, but as i only for archiving a few of my close friends, as it supports…
cavDXF on HN
InstaLooter
From 1 comment
I've use instalooter as a library to great success: https://github.com/althonos/InstaLooter Even made an issue on the repo when I ran into an issue setting it up on AWS and the…
ciferkey on HN
instagram_private_api
From 1 comment
I’m using this one: https://github.com/ping/instagram_private_api If you search for Instagram Private API, you’ll find implementations for almost any programming language (with…
dmitriid on HN
Flickr API and archive.org freely licensed images
From 1 comment
curious why you are scraping instagram for this purpose and not something like flickr which has a reasonable public api and tagged creative commons licensed images that are…
nsfmc on HN