This crawler was made because most of the crawlers out there seems to either require a browser or a developer account. This Instagram crawler utilizes a private API of Instagram and thus no developer account is required.
First install Instagram Private API. Kudos for a great project!
$ pip install git+https://github.com/ping/instagram_private_api.git
Now run __init__.py. It'll provide you with the command options. If this shows up, everything probably works
$ python __init__.py
usage: __init__.py [-h] -u USERNAME -p PASSWORD [-f TARGETFILE] [-t TARGET]
To get crawlin', you need to provide your Instagram username and password, and either an Instagram ID (target) or a text file of Instagram IDs in each row (targetfile). Wait a bit and a folder will be made with all the profiles crawled.
Inside __init__.py, there is a config dictionary. Each config option is explained in the comments.
Note that min_collect_media and max_collect_media is trumped if min_timestamp is provided as a number.
config = {
'search_algorithm' : 'BFS', # Possible values: BFS, DFS
'profile_path' : './profiles', # Path where output data gets saved
'max_followers' : 10, # How many followers per user to collect
'max_following' : 15, # how many follows to collect per user
'min_collect_media' : 10, # how many media items to be collected per person. If time is specified, this is ignored
'max_collect_media' : 10, # how many media items to be collected per person. If time is specified, this is ignored
'max_collect_users' : 1000, # how many users to collect in total.
# 'min_timestamp' : int(time() - 60*60*24*30*2) # up to how recent you want the posts to be in seconds. If you do not want to use this, put None as value
'min_timestamp' : None
}