Mastering Instagram Scraping: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Get Image Src of Carousel Posts with Selenium

Instagram, the visual haven, is a treasure trove of valuable data waiting to be scrapped. But, have you ever tried to get your hands on those elusive carousel post images? It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack! Fear not, dear scraper, for we’re about to embark on a thrilling adventure to conquer the Instagram carousel post image src retrieval with the mighty Selenium.

Why Selenium?

Selenium, an open-source tool, is the perfect companion for web scraping. It simulates a real browser, allowing you to interact with websites just like a human would. This makes it an ideal choice for Instagram scraping, as it can bypass those pesky anti-scraping measures.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.x installed on your machine
• Selenium installed using pip: pip install selenium
• A ChromeDriver executable (we’ll get to this later)
• A basic understanding of Python and Selenium

Setting Up the Environment

Create a new Python file, let’s call it instagram_scraper.py, and add the following code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

This imports the necessary Selenium modules. Now, let’s set up our ChromeDriver:

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless")
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1200")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path="/path/to/chromedriver")

Replace /path/to/chromedriver with the actual location of your ChromeDriver executable.

Navigating to Instagram

Let’s navigate to Instagram and log in using our credentials:

driver.get("https://www.instagram.com")
username_input = driver.find_element_by_name("username")
password_input = driver.find_element_by_name("password")

username_input.send_keys("your_username")
password_input.send_keys("your_password")

login_button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Log in')]")
login_button.click()

Replace "your_username" and "your_password" with your actual Instagram credentials.

Finding Carousel Posts

Now, let’s find those carousel posts! We’ll use a simple XPath expression to locate the posts:

posts = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//div[contains(@class, '_70iju')]")

This finds all elements with a class containing _70iju, which is a common class used by Instagram for posts.

Retrieving Image Src of Carousel Posts

The moment of truth! Let’s loop through each post and retrieve the image src:

for post in posts:
    post_images = post.find_elements_by_tag_name("img")
    for img in post_images:
        img_src = img.get_attribute("src")
        print(img_src)

This code finds all img tags within each post and retrieves the src attribute, printing it to the console.

Handling Carousel Posts with Multiple Images

Ah, but what about those pesky carousel posts with multiple images? We need to get all the images! Let’s modify our code:

for post in posts:
    post_images = post.find_elements_by_tag_name("img")
    carousel_images = []
    for img in post_images:
        img_src = img.get_attribute("src")
        carousel_images.append(img_src)
    if len(carousel_images) > 1:
        print("Carousel post with", len(carousel_images), "images:")
        for img in carousel_images:
            print(img)
    else:
        print("Single image:", carousel_images[0])

This code checks if a post has more than one image (i.e., it’s a carousel post) and prints all the image srcs if it does.

Putting it all Together

Here’s the complete code:

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument("--headless")
options.add_argument("--disable-gpu")
options.add_argument("--window-size=1920,1200")

driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options, executable_path="/path/to/chromedriver")

driver.get("https://www.instagram.com")
username_input = driver.find_element_by_name("username")
password_input = driver.find_element_by_name("password")

username_input.send_keys("your_username")
password_input.send_keys("your_password")

login_button = driver.find_element_by_xpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Log in')]")
login_button.click()

posts = driver.find_elements_by_xpath("//div[contains(@class, '_70iju')]")

for post in posts:
    post_images = post.find_elements_by_tag_name("img")
    carousel_images = []
    for img in post_images:
        img_src = img.get_attribute("src")
        carousel_images.append(img_src)
    if len(carousel_images) > 1:
        print("Carousel post with", len(carousel_images), "images:")
        for img in carousel_images:
            print(img)
    else:
        print("Single image:", carousel_images[0])

driver.quit()

Replace /path/to/chromedriver with the actual location of your ChromeDriver executable, and "your_username" and "your_password" with your actual Instagram credentials.

Conclusion

Voilà! You’ve successfully mastered the art of retrieving image srcs from Instagram carousel posts using Selenium. Pat yourself on the back, scraper extraordinaire! Remember to always respect Instagram’s terms of service and scraper responsibly.

Tips and Variations
Use a more specific XPath expression to target specific types of posts (e.g., videos, stories, etc.) Implement a retry mechanism to handle occasional Selenium timeouts Store the retrieved image srcs in a database or file for later use Experiment with other scraping tools, like Scrapy or BeautifulSoup

Happy scraping, and may the Instagram odds be ever in your favor!

Frequently Asked Question

Get ready to scrape Instagram like a pro! If you’re stuck on getting image src of carousel posts with Selenium, we’ve got you covered. Here are the top 5 FAQs to get you started: