Have you ever needed to automatically download all instagram photos from an account, from a certain hashtag or uploaded to a location? In this article how we can use the Python package Instaloader to download all that information in an automated way.

Installs a package for the Python programming language, which can also be used as a stand-alone program, and is intended for us to download photos, videos, stories and other information from Instagram.

And why would we be interested in downloading all those photos? Let’s imagine we want to make a backup of all the photos we have uploaded to our Instagram account, or create a program that migrates those to photos on another platform. Another use case for which this application can be interesting is to build a bank of images related to a theme (for example, photos that have been tagged with the hashtag #bastaya ).

With Instaloader we can make it download all the photos tagged with a certain hashtagy that have been uploaded within a certain date range. We can also ask it to download all the photos that have been geotagged in a certain place (we could ask it for example all the photos that have been uploaded at the European University, to include all the meta-information of those photos, and then calculate things like » which photo has had the most likes «, or » which area of the university is the most popular on Instagram «.

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To be able to install Instaloader, we first need to have PYTHON on our computer. On MAC, it comes standard. If you have a Windows computer, you must first download and install an updated version of python from this address: https://www.python.org/downloads

The following would be install Instaloader .

INSTALLATION (Windows and Mac)

Open a terminal and type:

$ pip3 install instaloader

USE

Once installed, if we want to use it to download all the photos and videos of a profile, we must write the following in a terminal:

$ installer profile

Where profile is the username of the instagram account we want to download. If we don’t indicate anything else, this will download all the photos and videos from that account, and will include some text files with the comments and metadata about each photo like the number of likes and comments, the users who have given likes, the geolocation , etc.

For example,

$ eupean installer

I would download all the photos from the university instagram account and save them in the »
» folder.
If we want to download the photos from a private Instagram account , we must use the –login parameter to make it work.

In fact, if we want to squeeze the tool a bit more, we need to use the parameter –login and use our instagram user for more things. With the login option we can do things like

• Download all photos in high resolution (HD).
• Download the stories of a profile.
• Download the photos and video from a private account.
• Download the highlights of an account.
• Download the photos in which a profile has been tagged.
• etc

We can also tell Instaloader to download all the photos and videos that have been uploaded in a certain location using the parameter %location_id , where the location id is the numerical tag with which Instagram locates locations. So for example, I can search the Instagram website for the location «European University» and find that it matches the ID «273479756».

Knowing this I can download the photos, videos and stories that have been made at the university (provided the location has been indicated) using this command:

$ instaloader –login –stories %273479756

Instaloader comes with an option to make the program run periodically and download and update new photos every X time (using cron).

This is a sample of some things you can do with this tool. If you want to see all the parameters and options of the program, take a look at the help included: