In this post, I am showing a new method on how to scrape the Instagram usernames of followers on any account or page. This is free at no cost, we are going to use a Chrome extension and then we will use a script to extract all of the usernames and download them to our computer.

There are only 3 steps:

  • Download the Chrome Extension.
  • Run and Scrape the Usernames
  • Download the usernames using the script

1. Download Chrome Extension

We are going to download and install an old version of Chrome extension of GrowBot Automator. We use the old version because it allows us to scrape the usernames from it.
-Download the extension here: https://bit.ly/3RJI5ik

-Once you download you have to open Chrome extension manager and drop the crx file inside. Then is going to directly install it in your extensions list.

2. Run and Scrape the Usernames

Now you just have to go to instagram.com and on the page that you want to scrape usernames or the link of the Instagram user Ex.(https://instagram.com/topnotchprogrammer) that you need to scrape.

From these images, you can see that we go to an Instagram page open the Chrome extension, and start scraping. The extension will scrape as much as we want and then we have to download these followers’ usernames, but the problem is that there is no option to download. In step 3 I will show how to download using a script.

3. Download the usernames using the script

Now after scraping just right-click in the browser and click on inspects. Inspect window is used for developers and here we have to paste a script.

Click in the console tab because here we can write javascript code, look at the image:

Below is the code that you have to paste, and after you paste just click enter. As soon as you click enter it is going to download a file with the usernames.

Here is the javascript code:

var elements = document.querySelectorAll("a.igBotQueueAcctUserName");

if (elements.length > 0) {
    var textContents = [];

    elements.forEach(function(element) {
        textContents.push(element.textContent);
    });

    var downloadLink = document.createElement("a");
    downloadLink.setAttribute("href", "data:text/plain;charset=utf-8," + encodeURIComponent(textContents.join("\n")));
    downloadLink.setAttribute("download", "usernames.txt");
    downloadLink.style.display = "none";

    document.body.appendChild(downloadLink);

    // Trigger the download
    downloadLink.click();

    // Remove the link from the document
    document.body.removeChild(downloadLink);
} else {
    console.log("No elements found.");
}

I hope it worked for you, in this method, you can scrape up to 20k-30k followers.

DISCLAIMER: MAKE SURE TO BE LOGGED IN WITH AN ACCOUNT THAT YOU DON’T USE BECAUSE SENDING A LOT REQUESTS TO INSTAGRAM COULD RESULT IN AN ACCOUNT BAN. MAKE SURE TO JUST CREATE A NEW ACCOUNT THAT YOU DONT NEED TO USE FOR SCRAPING.

THANK YOU!