Public Instagram posts are just data. Here's the whole pipeline.

The official API wants a developer account, an app review, and a business reason. But a public post already carries everything worth extracting: caption, hashtags, mentions, like count, comment threads, media URLs, video views, even location when the poster geotags it.

The Instagram Post Scraper + Comments & Metadata actor takes any of four handles — username, profile URL, post or reel URL, or raw user ID — and returns one clean record per post. Comments come flattened with author and timestamp so thread analysis is a group-by, not a scrape.

{
  "usernames": ["natgeo"],
  "resultsLimit": 12
}

Output per post:

{
  "shortCode": "C_xYz1234",
  "caption": "…",
  "hashtags": ["wildlife", "safari"],
  "likesCount": 48213,
  "commentsCount": 312,
  "comments": [{ "author": "…", "text": "…", "timestamp": "…" }],
  "displayUrl": "https://…jpg",
  "videoViewCount": null
}

Where it earns its keep

Competitor content calendars: pull a rival's last 50 posts and chart what formats and hashtags correlate with engagement. Influencer vetting: real comment text beats follower counts every time. Brand monitoring: mention tracking across captions without a listening-platform subscription.

The honest limit: this reads public profiles only. Private accounts return nothing, and heavy runs against one profile can hit rate limits — session cookies raise the ceiling if you have an account to spare.