Crawl stories of select Instagram users and backup them.
First, clone this repo.
You will need to get the cookie: header to be sent to Instagram to authenticate it's you. Instagram allows only authenticated users to watch Stories. To obtain the cookie, login into http://instagram.com.
Chrome: Open Developer Tools, change to the Network tab, reload instagram.com, scroll up in the request list, click instagram.com, find cookie: under Request headers in the Headers pane. Copy the contents of cookie:, and paste them into your prefs.json in place of whatever was in cookie: field now.
You will need to obtain the IDs of IG users whose Stories you want to backup. You can use this service to find them.
Edit the "ids:" section of prefs.json, replacing the examples with IDs and usernames of users whose Stories you want to backup.
This requires Python 3 and pip3 to be installed. You can download Python 3 at python.org/downloads. pip3 should be installed automatically with Python.
Next, run this in terminal in the directory where you cloned this to.
# pip3 install -r requirements.txt
To run the program:
$ python3 main.py
You will have to run it every 24 hours in order to catch all Stories by the people you follow before they disappear.
You can set quiet in prefs.json to suppress all program output except errors. Useful for running via cron.
Exclamation marks (!) mean that a Stories entry we tried to crawl is already in the database and dots (.) mean that an entry has been successfully added to the database.
The script saves all metadata into the SQLite3 database stories.sqlite3 and by default downloads media into files/username, where username is whatever you specified in prefs.json.
It doesn't check the username against IG, it only instructs the program to what directory should the media get downloaded.