Instagram Reels Scraper

Actor: esdrasdw/instagram-reels-scrapy-low-cost

Overview

This actor scrapes metadata from Instagram Reels for given user profiles. It outputs structured data to an Apify Dataset, suitable for export to JSON, CSV, or NDJSON formats. It's designed for building analytics dashboards, content auditing, and generating reports.

Key Features

• Extracts clean Reels metadata from public Instagram profiles.
• Output includes an Overview table (essential fields) and an Advanced view (full technical metadata).
• Allows selective field extraction to optimize for speed and data size.
• Provides example code for running via the Apify API (cURL, Python, Node.js).

How to Use

Apify Console

1. Go to the Actor page and click Run.
2. In the Input section, provide:
   • Instagram usernames (without @): One per line (e.g., instagram). Required.
   • Quantity per user: Maximum number of Reels to fetch per profile. Required. Default is 100.
   • What to extract? (optional): Leave empty for the automatic preset of essential fields, or manually select specific fields.
3. After the run completes, navigate to Storage → Dataset to preview and export your results.

Apify API

You can start a run programmatically. Replace APIFY_TOKEN with your actual token.

cURL:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/esdrasdw~instagram-reels-scrapy-low-cost/runs?token=APIFY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "usernames": ["instagram"],
  "quantity_per_user": 50
}'

Python:

import requests, json

ACT = "esdrasdw/instagram-reels-scrapy-low-cost"
TOKEN = "APIFY_TOKEN"

payload = {
    "usernames": ["instagram"],
    "quantity_per_user": 50
}

res = requests.post(
    f"https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/{ACT.replace('/', '~')}/runs?token={TOKEN}",
    headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"},
    data=json.dumps(payload),
    timeout=60,
)
print(res.json())

Input & Output

Input Parameters

• usernames (array, required): List of Instagram profile names (without @).
• quantity_per_user (integer, required): Max Reels to fetch per profile. Minimum 1. Default 100.
• selected_fields (array, optional): Leave empty for the automatic preset. To customize, provide a list from the available fields (see full list in the original README). Selecting fewer fields can speed up the run and simplify the output.

Output (Dataset)

Each item in the dataset represents one Instagram Reel.

The Overview includes core fields: thumb, titulo, usuario, link_post, data_criacao_iso, visualizacoes, curtidas, comentarios, duracao, aspect_ratio, url_video_preferencial, codigo, id.

The Advanced view contains all selected technical metadata.

Example Output Item (JSON):

{
  "thumb": "https://.../thumb.jpg",
  "titulo": "Weekly highlights",
  "usuario": "instagram",
  "link_post": "https://www.instagram.com/p/ABC123/",
  "data_criacao_iso": "2025-10-21T18:42:10Z",
  "visualizacoes": 123456,
  "curtidas": 7890,
  "comentarios": 321,
  "duracao": 27.4,
  "aspect_ratio": "9:16",
  "url_video_preferencial": "https://.../video.mp4",
  "codigo": "ABC123",
  "id": "3747990562646302857"
}