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For the past several years, my experience of Instagram (as a non-user) has been that occasionally I'll click on a link that leads there, and I'm met with a page

For the past several years, my experience of Instagram (as a non-user) has been that occasionally I'll click on a link that leads there, and I'm met with a page that asks me to attach a phone number to my account. There is no option to log out (it seems to be an evercookie) and no option to refuse. So I leave, not willing to give them a phone number and not wanting to bother with an incognito window. If it's important, I'll ask the person who posted the link to repost the content somewhere else.

andrepd 6y ago
There are mirrors: bibliogram.
emptyparadise 6y ago
Instagram just tells me to login, I can't even view individual posts.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
It's really easy to scrape Instagram from outside the browser as a non-user. No API or Access Token needed. Two steps: 1. Get the profile ID, 2. submit query via GraphQL. For example, if the username is "fish" and we want the first 36 entries. 1. x=$(wget -O- -q https://www.instagram.com/fish/?__a=1|grep -o "profilePage_[^\"]*" |sed 's/profilePage_//'); 2. wget -O- -q "https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=e769aa130647d2354c40ea6a439bfc08&variables={\"id\":\"$x\",\"first\":36,\"after\":\"\"}"
- annadane 6y ago
  Do you enter these two commands sequentially?
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Yes the profile ID is needed for the GraphQL query
- iggldiggl 6y ago
  While the API access isn't quite as limited as their regular website, don't they eventually block your IP after too many queries? At least that has been my experience when browsing via Imginn – eventually picture loading stalls and in the devtools you can see that in that case the GraphQL requests redirect to a login page instead of returning the desired data. At least that's where having a dynamic IP comes in handy :-P, and with Imginn some minimal fiddling with the page inspector (unhiding the "Load more" button again) lets you retry the query, so your infinite scrolling progress isn't lost.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    In their robots.txt, no crawl delays are given, someone seems to have overlooked that ?__a=2 works just as well as ?__a=1, and overall, whether they intended to or not, they appear to be saying they only want to allow certain bots. Perhaps try changing your user-agent string to match the ones in robots.txt. Generally I do not use middleman sites like Imginn as I find I can perform for myself whatever "service", e.g., downloading resources from some other website, they are offering.
Tagbert 6y ago
Alternatives like wget and mirrors are just not worth it. If it asks me to login, I will just abandon. Same with Pinterest. Neither is worth it.

andrepd 6y ago

There are mirrors: bibliogram.

emptyparadise 6y ago

Instagram just tells me to login, I can't even view individual posts.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

It's really easy to scrape Instagram from outside the browser as a non-user. No API or Access Token needed. Two steps: 1. Get the profile ID, 2. submit query via GraphQL. For example, if the username is "fish" and we want the first 36 entries. 1. x=$(wget -O- -q https://www.instagram.com/fish/?__a=1|grep -o "profilePage_[^\"]*" |sed 's/profilePage_//'); 2. wget -O- -q "https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=e769aa130647d2354c40ea6a439bfc08&variables={\"id\":\"$x\",\"first\":36,\"after\":\"\"}"

annadane 6y ago
Do you enter these two commands sequentially?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Yes the profile ID is needed for the GraphQL query
iggldiggl 6y ago
While the API access isn't quite as limited as their regular website, don't they eventually block your IP after too many queries? At least that has been my experience when browsing via Imginn – eventually picture loading stalls and in the devtools you can see that in that case the GraphQL requests redirect to a login page instead of returning the desired data. At least that's where having a dynamic IP comes in handy :-P, and with Imginn some minimal fiddling with the page inspector (unhiding the "Load more" button again) lets you retry the query, so your infinite scrolling progress isn't lost.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  In their robots.txt, no crawl delays are given, someone seems to have overlooked that ?__a=2 works just as well as ?__a=1, and overall, whether they intended to or not, they appear to be saying they only want to allow certain bots. Perhaps try changing your user-agent string to match the ones in robots.txt. Generally I do not use middleman sites like Imginn as I find I can perform for myself whatever "service", e.g., downloading resources from some other website, they are offering.

Tagbert 6y ago

Alternatives like wget and mirrors are just not worth it. If it asks me to login, I will just abandon. Same with Pinterest. Neither is worth it.