How to Use Python to Download an Instagram Profile Picture 2023 March

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How to Use Python to Download an Instagram Profile Picture

The profile photo is one of the most important aspects of any social media account, yet apps like Instagram do not enable you to see or save it. This procedure is simple to do using a web automation tool like Selenium with Python.

Learn how to utilize this dynamic pair to interact with any aspect on a website, automate it, and save time engaging in useful work. What’s more, the finest part? Create this without signing in or having an Instagram account!

The Algorithm Building Process

The process of recognizing the issue and outlining the processes that the software needs to automate is referred to as algorithm development. The following are the methods to downloading a profile picture:

Take a profile’s username as input
Open Google Chrome
Visit the Instagram profile
Download the profile picture

This serves as the algorithm of the problem statement.

This project uses the following Python modules and tools.

1. Urllib Module

Urllib is a Python package that handles internet URLs. This module will be used to obtain the account’s profile image from its source URL. If Urllib is missing from your system, you may install it using pip install urllib.

2. Time Module

This module, although not required, may cause the build to fail if your internet connection is sluggish if the website’s contents are not loaded during Python program interaction with the webpage. The delay() method allows us to add a tiny delay to ensure that the build does not fail.

3. Selenium Module

Selenium is a well-known open-source browser automation tool. It is available as a Python package that works with a variety of browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Mozilla Firefox. Open your Terminal and type pip install selenium to install Selenium in your Python environment.

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4. WebDriver

A web driver is a Selenium tool that creates a connection between the application and any website. Depending on the browser you wish to automate, many types of web drivers are available. You will need the Google Chrome browser for this build. To install the Chrome web driver, follow these steps:

Check the browser version you’re running by going to the Menu (3 dots) >Help > About Google Chrome.
Take note of the browser version.
Go to the ChromeDriver – WebDriver for Chrome downloads page.
From the current ChromeDriver releases, choose the option that corresponds to your version number.
Select and download the file that corresponds to your operating system.
Place the downloaded file in the same folder as your Python application. This will be useful in determining the route to take when coding.

How to Inspect Code for Automating Any Aspect of a Web Page

A fundamental familiarity of the web and its technologies is required for any web automation process utilizing Selenium and Python. The first stage is to learn about HTML, followed by CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) (CSS). This is where you will get acquainted with the concepts of ids and classes.

Ids and classes are unique names assigned to an element or collection of elements (tags). Using them, you find the appropriate piece and advise the Python program to explicitly target it. To analyze the code and find the profile image, do the following:

Navigate to the Instagram account’s homepage.
To access the Developer Tools view, go to the browser’s Menu > More Tools > Developer Tools, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + I.
Hover the mouse pointer over any element of the website to move to that piece of code by clicking and selecting the Element Picker tool (mouse cursor icon) in the left corner of the window.
It’s worth noting that the profile images for a public and private account are configured differently. Hover the mouse over a public account’s profile picture. The Public Profile’s class attribute is _aa8j.
For a private profile, repeat the preceding steps. _aadp is the class attribute.

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You may use this approach to comprehend any web page and automate any part.

How to Build the Instagram Profile Pic Downloader

Follow these steps to create the downloader.

Import the necessary Python modules into the Python environment. import webdriverimport timeimport urllib.request from selenium
Using the input function, get the username of the profile whose profile image is to be downloaded and save it in the variable username. username=input(“Enter the username of the profile: “) (“Enter the username of the profile: “)
Create an instance of the web driver and supply its file system path to it to get it started.
cd=’chromedriver.exe’ Make use of the webdriver. To open the Google Chrome browser, use the Chrome function. webdriver = driver Chrome(cd)
Any Instagram account’s URL begins with https://www.instagram.com/ and ends with the username. Set the profile URL as follows: url=’https://www.instagram.com/’ url p=url+user h
To the get() method, provide the full URL of the Instagram profile to be accessed.
driver.get(url p) Set the suggested delay for the web page to fully load. time. sleep(5)
To check if the profile photo belongs to a public profile, use the try-except block. The class attribute is used in the XPath statement to do this. In the event of a failure, utilize the except block to look for a private account’s profile image. try:image=driver.find element by xpath(‘/img[@class=” aa8j”]’)except:image=driver.find element by xpath(‘/img[@class=” aadp”]’)
Get the image’s src property using get attribute(). This returns the image’s link.
img link=image.get attribute(‘src’) Set the downloaded file’s path and extension. For example, you may specify that the image be downloaded in JPG format to your file system’s D: disk. path=”D:\\”+username+”.jpg”
Download the image by using the urlretrieve() method and supplying the link to the profile photo as the source and the path to the local system folder as the destination.urllib.request.urlretrieve(img link,path)
When you open the folder, you’ll see that the profile photo has been downloaded. You may additionally show the path where the profile photo was downloaded if desired. print(“The profile picture was obtained from: “+path)

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Final Source Code for Instagram Profile Pic Downloader Using Python

Bringing it all together, you get:


from selenium import webdriver 
import time
import urllib.request

user_h=input("Enter the username of the profile: ")

url='https://www.instagram.com/'
url_p=url+user_h

cd='chromedriver.exe'

driver = webdriver.Chrome(cd)

driver.get(url_p)

time.sleep(5)
try:

  image=driver.find_element_by_xpath('//img[@class="_aa8j"]')
except:

    image=driver.find_element_by_xpath('//img[@class="_aadp"]') 


img_link=image.get_attribute('src')

Applications of Web Automation

Automation not only saves you time, money, and effort, but it also ensures job completion while avoiding mistakes. Use this approach to automate website login, backup cloud servers, schedule messages, wish birthdays on social networking platforms, make articles, send tweets, and much more.

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