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MariyaSha/WebscrapingInstagram
Multiple Notebooks for Web Scraping Instagram with Selenium
A collection of Jupyter notebooks for scraping Instagram thumbnails and images using Selenium, built as a companion to a YouTube tutorial series. Aimed at beginners learning browser automation with Python. Last meaningfully updated December 2022.
Includes both a starter and a complete notebook, which is useful for following along incrementally. The December 2022 update does address the Selenium API breaking change (from `find_elements_by_tag_name` to `find_elements(By.TAG_NAME, ...)`). The image extraction notebook covers scrolling fixes and keyword search, which are the two things that typically break first in Instagram scrapers.
Instagram's DOM changes constantly and this hasn't been touched since late 2022 — there is a near-zero chance any of this still works without significant rework. It scrapes a logged-in session, which violates Instagram's ToS and risks account bans. No error handling, no rate limiting, no proxy support — the kind of things that matter the moment Instagram detects bot traffic. The Commenting_bot is particularly risky to run; mass-commenting via automation is the fastest path to a permanent ban.