How to Scrape Instagram Data in 2026: Profiles, Posts, Reels, Comments

Instagram holds a huge share of the visual web: brand campaigns, creator portfolios, product launches and the comment threads under them. It is also one of the harder platforms to get data out of. This guide shows how to pull public Instagram data (profiles, posts, reels, comments, hashtags, story highlights and transcripts) with plain HTTPS calls, with working code in cURL, JavaScript and Python.

Why is Instagram data hard to get?

Three things get in the way:

• The official API covers your own accounts. Meta’s Instagram APIs are designed for professional accounts you manage. Business Discovery gives you basic fields for other business and creator accounts, but not arbitrary public profiles, comment threads or hashtag feeds for a product.
• Logged-out browsing is locked down. Instagram shows a login wall after a few pages, rate-limits anonymous traffic hard, and the internal endpoints the web app uses change without notice.
• The data is spread out. A reel, a carousel and a photo are shaped differently, and counts, captions and audio sit in different places depending on which endpoint returned them.

Here is how the usual options compare:

The rest of this guide takes the last route.

What Instagram data can you get?

Every call below is live on crawlfeed today. The table is generated from the API’s own catalogue, so the endpoints and prices are exactly what you will be charged:

Everything comes back in crawlfeed’s unified types (Profile, Post, Comment and friends), which are the same across all 26 platforms.

Get an Instagram profile

You need an API key (new accounts get 100 free credits) and a handle, without the @:

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/profile \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "handle=natgeo"

The response is a Profile wrapped in the standard envelope. Trimmed, and with illustrative numbers, it looks like this:

{
  "data": {
    "platform": "instagram",
    "handle": "natgeo",
    "display_name": "National Geographic",
    "verified": true,
    "followers": 1234567,
    "following": 123,
    "posts_count": 12345,
    "bio": "…",
    "links": ["…"]
  },
  "meta": { "credits_used": 1, "credits_remaining": 99, "cache": "MISS", "data_age_s": 0 }
}

A profile costs 1 credit. Counts are always numbers, and a field Instagram does not expose comes back as null rather than disappearing, so your code does not need a special case per account.

Get posts from an Instagram account

/v1/instagram/posts returns an account’s recent posts, newest first, one page per call:

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/posts \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "handle=natgeo"

Each item is a Post with text (the caption), created_at, media (one entry per photo or video, with type, url, thumbnail_url and duration_s), engagement (likes, comments, views and friends), hashtags, mentions and is_ad. Carousels simply have more than one entry in media.

To get the next page, pass meta.next_cursor back as cursor. When next_cursor is missing, you have reached the last page. Every page is billed, so stop once you have enough:

import os, requests

posts, cursor = [], None
while True:
    params = {"handle": "natgeo", **({"cursor": cursor} if cursor else {})}
    res = requests.get(
        "https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/posts",
        params=params,
        headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['CRAWLFEED_KEY']}"},
    )
    body = res.json()
    posts.extend(body["data"])
    cursor = body["meta"].get("next_cursor")
    if not cursor or len(posts) >= 100:
        break

If you already know a post’s id, /v1/instagram/post?id=… returns just that one.

Get comments and replies on a post

Pass the post id as post_id:

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/comments \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "post_id=<post_id>"

Each Comment has the text, the author, likes, created_at and reply_to_id. Comments page the same way as posts. For the replies under one comment, call /v1/instagram/replies with both the post_id and the comment_id.

Reels, highlights, tagged posts and audio

Beyond the main grid, Instagram has a few surfaces of its own, and each has its own call:

• Reels: /v1/instagram/reels?handle=… lists an account’s reels only, which is usually what you want for video analytics.
• Story highlights: /v1/instagram/collections?handle=… lists an account’s highlights, and /v1/instagram/collection/posts?id=… returns the items inside one.
• Tagged posts: /v1/instagram/tagged?handle=… returns public posts other accounts have tagged a profile in, handy for tracking brand mentions and user-generated content.
• Audio: /v1/instagram/track/posts?id=… lists reels that use a given audio track.

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/reels \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "handle=natgeo"

Search, hashtags and trending

To discover content rather than read a known account:

• Keyword search: /v1/instagram/search/posts?q=… for posts, /v1/instagram/search/profiles?q=… for accounts, or /v1/instagram/search?q=… for the platform’s general search.
• Hashtags: /v1/instagram/hashtag?tag=… returns posts using a hashtag. Pass the tag without the #.
• Trending: /v1/instagram/trending returns what is trending right now, with an optional country.

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/hashtag \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "tag=coffee"

Get a reel transcript

For research, summaries or feeding reels to an LLM, the spoken words are often more useful than the caption:

curl -G https://api.crawlfeed.dev/v1/instagram/transcript \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY" \
  --data-urlencode "id=<id>"

A transcript costs 1 credit, and includes timings when they are available.

Handle errors and rate limits

Errors are RFC 9457 problem details with a stable code, so branch on the code, not the message:

A call that fails is refunded automatically, so retrying never charges you twice.

Add Arabic sentiment and dialect

If your audience writes in Arabic, add enrich=arabic to a profile, post or comments call. Each item gains an enrichment field with the dialect, sentiment, entities and topics, for 3 extra credits per call. It is most useful on comment threads, where it turns thousands of replies into a sentiment breakdown.

Use Instagram data from Claude or Cursor

If you would rather ask than code, connect the crawlfeed MCP server and your assistant gets the same calls as tools:

claude mcp add --transport http crawlfeed https://mcp.crawlfeed.dev/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $CRAWLFEED_KEY"

Then ask something like “which of @natgeo’s last 20 reels got the most comments, and what were people saying?”. The setup for every client is in our guide to MCP.

Wrapping up

For public Instagram data, a scraping API saves you from logins, proxies and parsers that break whenever the web app changes. With crawlfeed, every Instagram call costs one credit, and the same code works for TikTok, YouTube, X and LinkedIn. The full reference is at /docs/platforms/instagram.