Long story short, I’m trying to create an Instagram python scraper, that loads the entire page and grabs all the links to the images. I have it working, only problem is, it only loads the original 12 photos that Instagram shows. Is there anyway I can tell requests to load the entire page?
Working code;
import json
import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import sys
r = requests.get('https://www.instagram.com/accountName/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(r.text, 'lxml')
script = soup.find('script', text=lambda t: t.startswith('window._sharedData'))
page_json = script.text.split(' = ', 1)[1].rstrip(';')
data = json.loads(page_json)
non_bmp_map = dict.fromkeys(range(0x10000, sys.maxunicode + 1), 0xfffd)
for post in data['entry_data']['ProfilePage'][0]['graphql']['user']['edge_owner_to_timeline_media']['edges']:
image_src = post['node']['display_url']
print(image_src)
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Answer
As Scratch already mentioned, Instagram uses “infinite scrolling” which won’t allow you to load the entire page. But you can check the total amount of messages at the top of the page (within the first span with the _fd86t class). Then you can check if the page already contains all of the messages. Otherwise, you’ll have to use a GET request to get a new JSON response. The benefit to this is that this request contains the first field, which seems to allow you to modify how many messages you get. You can modify this from its standard 12 to get all of the remaining messages (hopefully).
The necessary request looks similar to the following (where I’ve anonymised the actual entries, and with some help from the comments):
https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=472f257a40c653c64c666ce877d59d2b&variables={"id":"XXX","first":12,"after":"XXX"}