Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive

Instagram Scraper — Extract Highlights, Covers & Rankings

Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive extracts every public story highlight from an Instagram profile — its title, ID, and cover image — then selects the highest-resolution version of that cover and archives a permanent copy so the link never expires. Each run can also add a per-profile summary row and a cross-profile leaderboard ranking every target by highlight count. Every response is typed, normalized JSON — no HTML, no selectors, no parsing required. After running it, you'll have a durable archive of highlight titles and covers that survives Instagram's own expiring CDN links.

What is Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive?

Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive is an Apify Actor that reads a public Instagram profile's story highlights tray and returns each highlight's title, ID, and cover image, upgraded to the highest resolution Instagram exposes and archived to a permanent URL. No Instagram account, login, or session cookie is required — it reads logged-out, public data only. Alongside the raw highlight rows, it can produce a per-profile analytics summary and a cross-profile leaderboard in the same run.

• Scrape story highlight titles, IDs, and cover images from any public profile
• Resolve profile URLs, usernames, direct highlight links, or post/reel/IGTV shortcodes to the owning profile
• Upgrade covers to full resolution and archive them to a permanent key-value store URL
• Generate an optional per-profile summary and cross-profile leaderboard
• Export results as JSON or CSV directly from the Actor's dataset

What data does Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive collect?

The Actor returns three distinct row types in one dataset: raw highlight rows, an optional per-profile summary row, and an optional cross-profile leaderboard row.

Data Type	Key Fields	JSON Field Names
Story Highlights	title, highlight ID, cover image, full-resolution cover	title, id, cover_media, cover_media_full_res
Archived Cover Images	permanent archive URL, CDN expiry timestamp	cover_media_archive_url, cover_media_expires_at
Per-Profile Summary	highlight count, combined titles, first/last highlight ID, success rate	profile_highlight_count, profile_titles, profile_success_rate
Cross-Profile Leaderboard	rank, highlight count, success rate	leaderboard_rank, profile_highlight_count, profile_success_rate

Need more Instagram data?

If you also need engagement numbers rather than highlight covers, Instagram Profile Scraper: Per-Post Likes & Comments returns full profile data plus a sampled engagement rate from recent posts. If you're researching content by topic instead of by profile, Instagram Hashtag Scraper: Top Post Data returns ranked Reels for any hashtag with audio metadata and engagement ranking. Both live in this same account and slot in alongside this Actor for a broader Instagram data pipeline.

Why not build this yourself?

Instagram's Graph API only exposes a Business or Creator account's own connected content — it has no endpoint for reading an arbitrary public profile's story highlights, which is this Actor's entire purpose. Building a logged-out scraper yourself means reverse-engineering Instagram's private GraphQL contract (relay document IDs, CSRF-cookie handling, defensive JSON parsing around its for (;;); anti-hijacking prefix), then maintaining it as Instagram changes that contract, plus building and paying for your own proxy escalation when requests get blocked. This Actor already does that work: it ships the resolved GraphQL query, a three-tier proxy fallback ladder, and a stable output schema, so you get the highlight data without owning the scraping infrastructure behind it.

Why do developers and teams scrape Instagram?

For brand and social media teams

Brand and agency teams use this Actor to archive their own or a client's highlight covers before Instagram's CDN link expires, keeping a permanent visual record of campaign highlight reels for reporting or asset reuse. Because cover_media_archive_url never rots, a marketing team can build a rolling visual archive of a profile's "Story Highlights" bar — titles and cover art — without re-scraping every time a report is due, and use the leaderboard row to compare highlight coverage across a roster of managed or competitor accounts in one run.

For competitive content analysis

Analysts tracking competitor accounts use enableLeaderboard to rank a batch of profiles by highlight count in a single run, surfacing which accounts maintain the most highlight categories without opening each profile manually. Combined with profile_titles from the per-profile summary row, a team can see at a glance which topics (e.g., "FAQ", "Reviews", "Behind the Scenes") a competitor organizes their highlights around, then feed that structured list into a spreadsheet or BI tool for recurring competitive reporting.

For AI engineers and agent builders

Agent builders use the Actor's typed JSON output — title, cover_media_full_res, and cover_media_archive_url — as a stable, non-expiring image source for RAG pipelines or vision-model inputs, avoiding the broken-link failures that come from indexing Instagram's own time-limited CDN URLs. Because the archived URL is permanent, an agent can re-fetch the same image weeks later without re-running the scrape, which matters for any pipeline that stores image references rather than image bytes.

For developers building data products

Developers building monitoring dashboards or digital asset management tools use the per-profile summary and leaderboard rows as ready-made aggregates instead of computing them client-side from raw highlight rows. Since those two row types are pushed without a charged event, a product built on top of this Actor gets free, structured analytics rows bundled with every batch of billed highlight rows, simplifying the downstream schema needed to power a dashboard.

How to scrape Instagram (step by step)

1. Open Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive on its Apify Store listing.
2. Provide one or more targets in highlightCoverTargets — a profile URL, username, @handle, direct highlight link, or post/reel/IGTV shortcode.
3. Configure options: leave maxHighlightsPerProfile at 0 for the full tray, or set a cap; toggle archiveCoverImages, enableProfileSummary, and enableLeaderboard as needed.
4. Start the run from the Apify Console or via the API.
5. Download results as JSON or CSV from the run's dataset, or read them via the API.

What to do when Instagram changes its structure

This Actor is maintained, and its output schema is kept stable — field names and types don't change on your end even if Instagram's internal endpoints do. No specific turnaround time is promised for any given structural change, but integrations built against the documented fields keep working without a rewrite on your side.

⬇️ Input

Every field is optional — the Actor runs with defaults if you supply nothing but highlightCoverTargets.

Parameter	Required	Type	Description	Example Value
highlightCoverTargets	No	array	Profile URL, username (username or @username), direct highlight link (https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/<id>/), or post/reel/IGTV shortcode — each is resolved to its owning profile via Instagram's public embed pages. Also accepts the base actor's startUrls key.	["https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/"]
maxHighlightsPerProfile	No	integer (default 0, min 0)	Cap on highlights fetched per profile across all pages of the tray. 0 = unlimited (fetch every page until Instagram reports no more).	0
archiveCoverImages	No	boolean	Downloads the highest-resolution cover (max width × height across all image_versions2 candidates) and stores a permanent copy in the run's key-value store.	true
enableProfileSummary	No	boolean (default true)	Pushes one extra, uncharged summary row per profile — highlight count, combined titles, first/last highlight ID, success rate.	true
enableLeaderboard	No	boolean (default true)	Pushes one extra, uncharged leaderboard row per profile at the end of the run, ranking every profile by highlight count.	true
proxyLadderConfig	No	object (proxy editor)	Proxy configuration. On a platform block, the Actor falls back from your selection to datacenter, then residential, genuinely carrying your apifyProxyGroups/apifyProxyCountry through both fallback tiers. Also accepts the base actor's proxyConfiguration key.	{ "useApifyProxy": true }

{
  "highlightCoverTargets": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/",
    "nasa",
    "https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17895948565602293/"
  ],
  "maxHighlightsPerProfile": 0,
  "archiveCoverImages": true,
  "enableProfileSummary": true,
  "enableLeaderboard": true,
  "proxyLadderConfig": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Since no parameter is marked required, the most common mistake is starting a run with an empty highlightCoverTargets list — the Actor logs an error and exits immediately with no dataset rows, so always supply at least one target.

⬆️ Output

Results are typed, normalized JSON, with a consistent 21-field schema shared across all three row types, exportable as JSON, CSV, Excel, or the other formats Apify's dataset export supports.

Scraped Story Highlight

{
  "input_url": "https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/",
  "username": "mrbeast",
  "user_id": "3223361110",
  "type": "instagram_highlights",
  "id": "17895948565602293",
  "title": "FAQ",
  "cover_media": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/example_150x150.jpg?oe=66B1F2A0",
  "cover_media_full_res": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/example_1170x2080.jpg?oe=66B1F2A0",
  "cover_media_expires_at": "2026-08-01T12:00:00+00:00",
  "cover_media_archive_url": "https://api.apify.com/v2/key-value-stores/abc123/records/cover-17895948565602293.jpg",
  "success": true,
  "error": null,
  "isSummary": false,
  "profile_highlight_count": null,
  "profile_titles": null,
  "profile_first_highlight_id": null,
  "profile_last_highlight_id": null,
  "profile_success_rate": null,
  "isLeaderboard": false,
  "leaderboard_rank": null,
  "timestamp": "2026-07-25T14:02:11.000000+00:00"
}

Not every highlight guarantees a resolution upgrade: cover_media_full_res is only raised above the tray thumbnail when Instagram's reels endpoint returns a matching asset for that exact cover photo. When no match is found, the Actor honestly falls back to the original tray cover rather than returning an unrelated, higher-resolution image.

Per-Profile Summary Row

{
  "input_url": "https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/",
  "username": "mrbeast",
  "user_id": "3223361110",
  "type": "instagram_highlights_profile_summary",
  "id": null,
  "title": null,
  "cover_media": null,
  "cover_media_full_res": null,
  "cover_media_expires_at": null,
  "cover_media_archive_url": null,
  "success": true,
  "error": null,
  "isSummary": true,
  "profile_highlight_count": 14,
  "profile_titles": "FAQ | Behind the Scenes | Merch | Q&A",
  "profile_first_highlight_id": "17895948565602293",
  "profile_last_highlight_id": "17896001234567890",
  "profile_success_rate": 1.0,
  "isLeaderboard": false,
  "leaderboard_rank": null,
  "timestamp": "2026-07-25T14:02:15.000000+00:00"
}

Cross-Profile Leaderboard Entry

{
  "input_url": "https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/",
  "username": "mrbeast",
  "user_id": "3223361110",
  "type": "instagram_highlights_leaderboard_entry",
  "id": null,
  "title": null,
  "cover_media": null,
  "cover_media_full_res": null,
  "cover_media_expires_at": null,
  "cover_media_archive_url": null,
  "success": true,
  "error": null,
  "isSummary": false,
  "profile_highlight_count": 14,
  "profile_titles": null,
  "profile_first_highlight_id": null,
  "profile_last_highlight_id": null,
  "profile_success_rate": 1.0,
  "isLeaderboard": true,
  "leaderboard_rank": 1,
  "timestamp": "2026-07-25T14:05:40.000000+00:00"
}

How many results can you scrape with Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive?

There's no hard cap on the number of profiles you can list in highlightCoverTargets, and maxHighlightsPerProfile defaults to 0 (unlimited) — the Actor pages through the highlights tray via its has_next_page/end_cursor cursor until Instagram reports no more results. As a runaway-loop safety net (not a normal-use limit), pagination for a single profile stops after 50 GraphQL pages, a ceiling ordinary highlight trays fall well under. If a profile has no public highlights, the Actor returns a single definitive "no highlights found" row rather than exhausting retries. No benchmark run time is published, since actual duration depends on the number of targets, tray size, and whether proxy fallback is triggered.

Integrate Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive and automate your workflow

Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive works with any language or tool that can send an HTTP request, since it runs as a standard Apify Actor with a REST API.

REST API integration

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_API_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("API-Empire/instagram-highlights-scraper-cover-archive").call(
    run_input={
        "highlightCoverTargets": ["https://www.instagram.com/mrbeast/"],
        "archiveCoverImages": True,
    }
)

for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["username"], item["title"], item["cover_media_archive_url"])

Works in Python, Node.js, Go, Ruby, cURL, or any HTTP client — authenticate with your Apify API token as a bearer credential.

Automation platforms (n8n, Make)

In n8n, the Apify node's "Run Actor" operation can call this Actor by ID and pass highlightCoverTargets directly from an upstream node, then feed the resulting dataset into downstream nodes. In Make, the Apify app's actor-run module works the same way — trigger a run, wait for it to finish, then iterate the dataset items to route archived cover URLs into a spreadsheet, CMS, or storage bucket.

Is it legal to scrape Instagram?

Scraping publicly available data is generally lawful; this Actor only returns data from public Instagram profiles — no login, private-account access, or authentication bypass is involved. Because the output includes personal data such as usernames, user IDs, and profile-linked highlight content, GDPR/CCPA-style considerations around lawful basis, storage limitation, and purpose apply if you store or reuse it, particularly for EU or California-connected individuals. Consult legal counsel for commercial use cases involving bulk personal data.

Frequently asked questions

Does Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive work without an Instagram account?

Yes. It reads public profile and highlight data logged-out — no Instagram account, login, or session cookie is required for any input parameter.

How often is the scraped data updated?

Every run fetches live from Instagram at the time it executes — nothing is served from a cache. Re-run the Actor to get current highlight data.

What happens if a profile has no public highlights?

The Actor returns one row with success: false and an explanatory error message ("No highlights found for this profile.") instead of retrying indefinitely or fabricating data — Instagram's response was accepted, it just contained an empty tray.

Can I scrape private Instagram accounts' highlights?

No. Only public profiles are supported. A private profile's page won't expose the tokens the Actor needs, and the run reports that profile as unresolved rather than bypassing the privacy setting.

Are the per-profile summary and leaderboard rows billed the same as highlight rows?

No. Highlight rows (and per-profile error rows) are billed under the row_result charged event; the summary and leaderboard rows are pushed without a charged event name, so they're free. To isolate only billed rows when processing output, filter out any item where isSummary or isLeaderboard is true.

Does Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive work for AI agent workflows and LLM pipelines?

Yes. It's callable as a standard HTTP endpoint by any agent framework, and every response is typed JSON — no HTML or selectors to parse before passing results into an LLM context window or agent tool call.

How does Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive handle Instagram's anti-bot system?

It escalates through three tiers on a block (HTTP 429/403): no proxy first, then a datacenter proxy, then a residential proxy that retries up to three times and stays sticky for the rest of the run. Requests also use exponential backoff between retries and defensively parse Instagram's GraphQL response format, including its for (;;); anti-hijacking prefix.

Does Instagram Highlights Scraper & Cover Archive return data in a format LLMs can use directly?

Yes. Output is typed, normalized JSON with stable field names across all three row types — pass it directly to an LLM, index it into a vector store, or route it through an agent tool without a parsing step.

Can I use it without managing proxies?

Yes. The Actor defaults to no proxy and automatically escalates to Apify's datacenter and residential proxy tiers on a block; you only need to configure proxyLadderConfig if you want to steer which proxy groups or country are used.

What happens when Instagram changes its structure or blocks the scraper?

The Actor is maintained, and its output schema stays stable — field names and types don't change on your end. No specific turnaround time is promised for any given fix.

Your feedback

Found a bug or missing a field? We want to know. Reach out through the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store or the API-Empire support channel, and we'll take a look — reports like this are how the Actor stays maintained as Instagram's own structure evolves.