BasketCase

Download images and videos from Instagram.

Notable features:

• Stories can be downloaded without triggering the "seen" flag.
• Downloads a high quality version of a profile picture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTGr5t3MoY ;)

Installation

Install it from PyPI as a user install.

pip install --user basketcase

This should put the executable basketcase on your PATH.

Alternatively, you could install it in a virtual environment. I keep mine at ~/venv, and I have a shell alias to quickly activate it.

Also, a pre-built executable for Linux is provided with the releases.

Command-line usage

basketcase -u "https://instagram.com/p/<post_id>"

Downloaded resources will be stored in the current working directory (i.e. $PWD/basketcase_downloads).

To download from multiple URLs, create a text file (e.g. urls.txt) and populate it with resource URLs:

https://instagram.com/p/<post_id>
https://instagram.com/reel/<reel_id>
https://instagram.com/<username>

basketcase -f ./urls.txt

See --help for more info.

Supported URLs

Authentication

1. Add a session cookie

basketcase --cookie <session_cookie_id> --cookie-name "my session"
# Added session id: 1

2. Specify its identifier when downloading

basketcase -s 1

List all available sessions with basketcase -l. To disable sessions, use --no-session. If only one exists, it is treated as the default.

User data

Cookies and other application data are kept in your home directory (i.e. ~/.basketcase).

Development setup

See Packaging Python Projects.

1. cd to the project root and create a virtual environment in a directory named venv, which is conveniently ignored in version control.
2. Install the dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Install this package in editable mode.

pip install -e .

Package build and upload

1. Update the requirements list.

pip freeze --exclude-editable > requirements.txt

2. Increment the version on pyproject.toml.
3. Build the package.

python -m build

4. Commit and push the changes (and a new version tag) to the git repository.
5. Publish it.

python -m twine upload dist/*

Build an executable

With the zipapp module we can build the whole package as an executable file for Linux. The only runtime requirement is Python 3.

1. cd to the project root.
2. Activate the virtual environment.
3. Run sh zipapp.sh.

The executable file basketcase is in the dist folder.