💾 Archived View for republic.circumlunar.space › users › johngodlee › posts › 2019-10-20-ig-dl.gmi captured on 2021-12-04 at 18:04:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
DATE: 2019-10-20
AUTHOR: John L. Godlee
There are lots of people I would like to follow on Instagram, mostly woodworkers, bicycle people, and outdoors people. It seems to be a really good method of delivering content. Unfortunately for Instagram, there is absolutely no way I would make an account with them. I fear it would be too much of a time sink, and I'm paranoid of giving too much detail of my personal interests to Facebook.
I found a command line tool called InstaLooter[1] which you can use to scrape public Instagram profiles without an account and save the images on my local machine which I can then read at my leisure, in the spirit of RSS. This is how I implemented the program.
1: https://github.com/althonos/InstaLooter
I created a text file which lives in my $HOME called .ig_subs.txt. The file holds a list of Instagram user IDs for the accounts I want to scrape from:
kelsoparadiso lloyd.kahn exploringalternatives barnthespoon terrybarentsen woodlands.co.uk zedoutdoors mossy_bottom
Then I made a shell script which lives in my path, called insta_dl:
#!/bin/bash # Make directory if it doesn't exist mkdir -p $HOME/Downloads/ig # make newlines the only separator IFS=