Instagram Story Scraper

An Apify actor that downloads Instagram Stories and extracts their metadata. It processes story URLs, downloads images and videos to Apify storage, and returns detailed information about each media item.

Overview

This actor is designed for programmatic access to Instagram Stories. You provide one or more story URLs (like https://www.instagram.com/stories/nba/), and it fetches all available stories from that source. It downloads the media files (JPG images and MP4 videos) to Apify's key-value store and returns a dataset containing secure CDN URLs for the files along with comprehensive technical metadata.

Use cases include content archiving, media analysis, and batch processing of ephemeral story content.

Key Features

• Media Download: Downloads both images and videos from public Instagram Stories.
• Metadata Extraction: Returns technical details for each file, including:
  • Resolution, file size, and format.
  • For videos: codec, duration, and bitrate.
  • For images: dimensions and color space.
• Bulk Processing: Handles multiple story URLs in a single run.
• Proxy Support: Configurable proxy settings (using Apify Proxy) to help avoid geo-restrictions or IP blocks.
• Structured Output: Returns a clear JSON array with success status, media counts, and organized media items.

How to Use

1. Configure the actor's input with your target Instagram story URLs and any proxy settings.
2. Run the actor.
3. Retrieve the results from the actor's dataset, which will contain the list of media items with their Apify storage URLs and metadata.

Input

Configure the actor using a JSON input object. The story_urls array is required.

{
  "story_urls": [
    { "url": "https://www.instagram.com/stories/username/" }
  ],
  "proxy": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"],
    "apifyProxyCountry": "US"
  }
}

Output

The actor outputs an array of objects, one for each processed input URL. Each object contains the original URL, a success flag, arrays of media items and their metadata, and total counts.

[
  {
    "url": "https://www.instagram.com/stories/nba/",
    "success": true,
    "media_items": [
      {
        "Story No": 1,
        "type": "image",
        "Media URL": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/.../nba_story_1.jpg"
      }
    ],
    "total_count": 29,
    "video_count": 17,
    "image_count": 12,
    "image_story_metadata": [
      {
        "Story No": 1,
        "Media URL": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/NQt1UcMJlR2cwCmFJ/records/nba_story_1.jpg?token=apify_actor_run_api_vqbWq4SWvcMS8kRGUQVa28psLVmLvS3X84SJ",
        "metadata": {
          "filename": "/tmp/tmppzqxwc2f.jpg",
          "width": 1170,
          "height": 2080,
          "size": "420239"
        }
      }
    ],
    "video_story_metadata": [
      {
        "metadata": {
          "codec": "h264",
          "duration": "15.360000",
          "bit_rate": "1211164"
        }
      }
    ]
  }
]

• media_items: A summary list of all stories with type and direct download URL.
• image_story_metadata / video_story_metadata: Detailed arrays containing the full Apify storage URL (with access token) and the complete technical metadata for each file.
• The Media URL in media_items and the Media URL in the metadata arrays point to the same file. The metadata URL includes the access token required for download.