Instagram Scraper - Profiles, Posts & Reels (No Login)

Instagram Scraper: profiles, posts and reels from a username or a link

Give it a username and you get that account's profile row plus the media on its public grid. Give it a post or reel link and you get that one item, whether or not it is still on the grid. Everything comes back flat, one row per thing, ready for a sheet or a database.

The part worth knowing up front: a signed-out run sees the grid Instagram serves a visitor. On most accounts that is the whole grid. On a few it is smaller than what you see while logged in, and no signed-out route reaches the difference. Paging also stops at 60 pages, so a very large account will not come back complete in one run.

🔍 What Instagram Scraper does

Any public account works, including brands and creators with a business category set. You get the profile row and then the posts on the grid, the same as for a personal account. On some business accounts postsCount and isBusinessAccount come back null; the rest of the row is filled in.

A username returns the grid in the grid's own order: pinned tiles first, then newest first. Every media row carries isPinned, and skipPinnedPosts drops the pinned ones if you want plain publication order. Reels an account keeps off its grid are a separate set, and includeReelsTabOnly adds them.

Hashtags and mentions are parsed out of the caption for you. Tagged users, collaborators and sponsors come back as their own arrays with ids, names and links. Rows are deduplicated inside a run, so nothing is returned or billed twice.

📥 What you give it

{
  "usernames": ["nasa"],
  "resultsLimit": 50
}

Run it with nothing at all and you get one labelled sample row, free, so you can see the shape first.

📤 What you get back

A real profile row from a real run, with the picture link and the bio cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "type": "profile",
  "username": "nasa",
  "id": "528817151",
  "fullName": "NASA",
  "biography": "Making the seemingly impossible, possible. ...",
  "externalUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/",
  "followersCount": 104352628,
  "followsCount": 91,
  "postsCount": 4928,
  "verified": true,
  "isBusinessAccount": true,
  "private": false,
  "profilePicUrl": "https://scontent-lga3-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/...",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"
}

Post and reel rows come back with type set to image, video or carousel, and carry:

Fields Instagram leaves out stay null rather than being guessed. postsCount and isBusinessAccount are the two that go null when the run had to fall back to the rendered page.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row can land in your dataset.

Filter on ok == true and you have your data. NOT_FOUND means Instagram showed the item as gone. BLOCKED means the route refused that item this run, which re-running usually clears. PARTIAL means a profile's posts stopped coming part way, and postsDelivered says how many arrived. Either way the run carries on to the next item and none of these rows is billed.

One quirk of the Overview table: it shows post columns, so a profile row reads as an almost empty line there. Open the row itself or download the JSON and it is all present.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Type a handle into Profile usernames, or paste links into Start URLs. 3. Set Max results. Start at 50 while you look at the output shape. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.45 per 1,000 rows. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

A profile row and a post row cost the same. You pay for rows that carry data, so the sample row, diagnostic rows, posts dropped by your date filter and duplicates inside a run are not charged. resultsLimit is the ceiling on both the rows and the spend.

💡 What people use it for

• Pulling a competitor's recent posts every Monday and diffing the like and comment counts.
• Building a content archive for a handful of accounts, captions and media links included.
• Checking one post or reel at a time from links a team drops into a channel.
• Measuring posting cadence: timestamp across a grid tells you how often an account actually ships.

🚧 What it does not do

• No comments, follower lists or stories. Those are separate actors, two of them linked below.
• A private account returns the profile shell only. Bio, counts and private: true come

through. There is nothing public behind it to read.

• Recent posts, not the full archive. Paging stops at 60 pages, so a very large account needs

onlyPostsNewerThan to make the walk purposeful.

• postsCount and isBusinessAccount can be null when the run fell back to the rendered page.

The rest of the profile row is still there.

• A signed-out run can see a smaller grid. If a profile shows more in your browser than the run

returned, that is what you are looking at, and your own cookie is the fix.

• Media links expire. They are signed, short-lived links. Fetch anything you want to keep.
• Counts are a snapshot at read time, not at publish time.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an Instagram account? No. Everything above works signed out. The cookie field is only for the accounts where a signed-out reader sees less.

Is resultsLimit per username or per run? Per run, and the profile row counts towards it. Ask for 100 across three handles and you get 100 rows in total, not 300.

Why did I get fewer posts than I asked for? Either the account has fewer, your date filter dropped them, or the walk hit its paging ceiling on a very large grid.

Is scraping Instagram legal? This reads public profiles and public posts only, never private accounts or messages. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Apify's scheduler, or start it from the API and read the dataset when it finishes.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Include the username or link you used and the run ID, and the log is enough for us to see what happened.