I'm no longer the maintainer

[HuiiBuh]

Hi, I am looking for a new maintainer, because I do not use IG and I do not find any pleasure in developing this extension any more.
If you want to maintain this extension please contact me.

[dpacassi]

Hi @HuiiBuh!

Just checked your repo since the extension in 4.6.1 is not working anymore.
But I saw that you're releasing 4.6.2, so I'll wait for the update and hopefully the extension works again.

About looking for a new maintainer, I won't be able to develop new big features but I surely would be able to update the selectors for downloading media if IG changes them again.
I have experience maintaining cross platform open source extensions, check e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javascript/ for Firefox, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-javascript/jfpdlihdedhlmhlbgooailmfhahieoem for Chrome and the repo at https://github.com/dpacassi/disable-javascript .

If you think that I'd be a good fit, I'm happy to take over from you!
Of course the extension would not be sold and remain open source for all times.

[lifenautjoe]

Hi @HuiiBuh ,

I also volunteer myself as a maintainer and feature developer.

I have built and shipped several npm packages as well as an open-source social network and lastly, manage an API for crawling websites https://peekalink.io so I have the experience of getting around all sort of restrictions from Instagram and keeping up with changes.

Feel free to reach out at [email protected].

Take care!

Joel.

[Allen-Kwan]

Just wanted to say thanks for the work you've put into the extension over the past while - the fact that you had to remove the bulk downloader is a sign of how much work it must have been to keep up with all the changes they've been making.

[Grabou]

Hello @HuiiBuh. Thanks for the hard work on this extension. I hope someone will take it over.

Best of luck!

[K1000T]

tristemente no tengo los conociemientos para poder mantener y cuidar la extension, soy un estudiante, pero si crees que puedo hacerlo me podrias contactar y darme un pequeño tutorial de como mantener la extension.

[dineshdb]

Hi, I can take over this project. I would also be happy to share the burden with you or anyone else who takes over.
The project however, should always remain open-source for me to participate.

[desbest]

Hello I’m willing to maintain this extension. I’m a web developer who is willing to learn Typescript and WebExtensions. My portfolio is here.

[desbest]

For all those waiting for a fix, I've managed to modify someone else's extension that was last updated in 2021, to then fix bugs by adding a throttle (or delay) inbetween fetching each post, in order to prevent Instagram from giving you the user a HTTP 426 Too Many Requests error, to then be denied access to Instagram for few hours or days. Before it would fetch hundreds of posts in the same second.

It's not at the quality to be considered worth releasing, so you won't see my edits available in the Chrome Web Store and there's 2 bugs left to fix. But it's usable and functional anyway.

And yes, it does support carousel posts. So if a post has 2-10 images attached to it, it'll download each one. It also supports video downloads.

Right now the throttle is somewhere sporadically random around 2-5 seconds and the user inputted one isn't being respected. I think I need to implement javascript promises, as javascript doesn't always execute in a linear and sequential fashion, due to the way javascript engines like V8 and Chakra work. It often likes to strangely bounce around a bit and execute a line within the same scope, that is 50 lines after the next subsequent one.

That was 7 hours of work to turn unusable code into functional code. Especially because it's OOP and I don't understand object orientated programming. OOP drives me mad, I can't work my head around it.

You can download the updated version here.

[toshimigita]

Hi I am looking for assistance regarding this update where the download file shows unknown name. Is there anyone here that is able to assist? Also regarding the taking over of this project even though I am not able to assist techwise, I am able to fund this project if needed. Thank you

[kmbarr]

I submitted a PR309 to add some selectors and fix some other minor things, like the "unknown" account name in story downloads. I think I could resolve some of the other outstanding issues too with a bit of an overhaul. Let me know if you want me to contribute more.

[afterdelight]

For all those waiting for a fix, I've managed to modify someone else's extension that was last updated in 2021, to then fix bugs by adding a throttle (or delay) inbetween fetching each post, in order to prevent Instagram from giving you the user a HTTP 426 Too Many Requests error, to then be denied access to Instagram for few hours or days. Before it would fetch hundreds of posts in the same second.

It's not at the quality to be considered worth releasing, so you won't see my edits available in the Chrome Web Store and there's 2 bugs left to fix. But it's usable and functional anyway.

And yes, it does support carousel posts. So if a post has 2-10 images attached to it, it'll download each one. It also supports video downloads.

Right now the throttle is somewhere sporadically random around 2-5 seconds and the user inputted one isn't being respected. I think I need to implement javascript promises, as javascript doesn't always execute in a linear and sequential fashion, due to the way javascript engines like V8 and Chakra work. It often likes to strangely bounce around a bit and execute a line within the same scope, that is 50 lines after the next subsequent one.

That was 7 hours of work to turn unusable code into functional code. Especially because it's OOP and I don't understand object orientated programming. OOP drives me mad, I can't work my head around it.

You can download the updated version here.

could you release it as a firefox extension?

[desbest]

I’ve made some more improvements since then that I need to upload to gitlab. However there’s more to do until I consider it finished. The original author last updated it in 2020.

Right now there’s

• 1 major bug: a memory leak that slows down the web browser even after navigating to another Instagram page
• 1 moderate bug: catch the error for when Instagram redirects to the challenge web page, to ask for the user to validate their email address or phone number. Right now no error is displayed so the user would be waiting for nothing, until they browse off the web page.
• 1 minor bug: allowing the “posts to fetch” text box to update to the latest amount of posts after scrolling down, as an alternative to the user typing in a number
• 1 missing feature: blocking Ajax/XHR requests to 3 different event logging analytics
• User Testing by me: Test it with accounts with X number of posts. Amount successfully tested so far is 500, next up is 750. The highest I’ll go is 3000.
• Programmers only: Clean up the quality and readability of the coding style, as well as adding comments and renaming variables and functions.

I don’t think I’ll be releasing it generally to the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Addons Store. I’m not sure. Here’s why.

It's slowing my computer down as the V8/Chakra/Sunspider javascript engine in web browsers (Chrome/Edge) is not designed to fetch hundreds of images to fill a zip file of 300MB of over. It just makes the laptop slow and it's a fast one.

Microsoft Edge's and Google Chrome's idea of being multi-process in order to prevent one faulty tab from crashing the entire web browser to force an exit, is to keep each tab in its own process. They also sandbox the audio and video so if a youtube video embed crashes or some autoplay video advert in the corner of the screen, the rest of the tab stays intact.

However if ONE tab is using a relatively high amount of disk usage, and there's other software in the background in Windows that is also using disk usage, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome does not compartmentalise the ONE tab with high disk usage against the remaining tabs with less disk usage to be classed as two separate compartments. It treats them all as one.

If I was to make the web browser have a pause or sleep for 12 seconds or 2 minutes, the disk usage percentage as shown in Task Manager, should in theory slow down to reduce by becoming lower but instead it stays the same.

Because of this, the hard drive is prevented from having a millisecond or nanosecond rest, as much as it normally should on an intermittent basis, so the longer the extensive disk usage happens, the slower the computer gets, even if you're downloading the same amount of files that you did right now, than you did 1 hour ago.

It just gets increasingly and exponentially slower, even if your disk usage is maintained at the same constant rate.
I always wondered why 3D games and photoshop alternatives had a shoddy and abysmal performance when ran in the web browser. And now I know!

And there's nothing I can do as a web developer, to prevent, mitigate or avoid it.
The longer you use it, the slower it gets!

Something that should have taken 5-30 minutes as a windows program ended up taking 5 hours as a Chrome and Edge web browser extension while slowing the computer down.
Download an instagram account with 500 posts = 5 hours

I don’t think that I’m going to be able to release it. It won’t appear on the Chrome Web Store. All that would happen is that I would get a lot of 1 star reviews from people complaining about the terribly slow performance.

I think the only way to make it work is to have it as a windows software

PS. I’ve not tested the performance in Firefox

My laptop specifications are

• Windows 10
• 8GB RAM
• Intel i5 10th generation code name Ice Lake,
• 5800RPM hard disk drive HDD. Don’t worry, it’s not Seagate. :P

[afterdelight]

nuice, then releasse it as a window x program

[desbest]

nuice, then releasse it as a window x program

Yes but the problem is that I don't know how to make windows programs.

In around 6 months, I would have finished programming everything that I possibly could on my web developer portfolio. I would have exhausted all my software projects, web development wise.
I'll soon be learning how to make iphone and android apps as soon as windows programs. But unfortunately I can't give an ETA estimated date of arrival, as the learning curve is HUGE.
And no it won't be an Electron app as it has terrible performance and lacks important APIs, it'll be using the Microsoft stack like the .NET Framework, C#/F#/VB and some Microsoft windowing engine.

Electron looks like something that silicon valley startups use, to compensate for the fact that a React Native developer costs $50,000 a year whereas a native "swift cocoatouch iphone" or "java android" programmer instead costs $80,000 a year. For them, the increased labour costs isn't the problem, it's that there's a "skills gap" as the required programmers are in short supply, so they're hard to attract to recruit and hire. So even if Electron is cheaper, I'm sure that its "social costs" byproduct makes it inevitably more expensive when it contributes to higher customer support costs, when users are complaining about bugs and the shoddy performance..

There's a running joke that web developers aren't real developers as they don't understand memory.

As a stopgap, I think that it might be a good idea to fork this Windows program, Raider, for bulk downloading instagram posts, that has recently been discontinued. The software stopped working 2-3 weeks ago so someone needs to update it. And it's powered by the Electron framework.

[HuiiBuh]

Hi there. Sry for not replying I had a few stressful weeks.
I would be happy to keep this project running and open source.

I had two requests for a buyout >10k but both would have scammed the users so for the foreseeable future I will not sell this extension.

However I need your support. If you find a bug/something that is not working correctly please create a PR that I can merge.
As I do not have enough time to read issues, reply and fix them for the foreseeable future I would have to count on you to do this. If you want some crazy new feature just implement it and create a PR. If you do not like the current architecture (and I cannot blame you, I don't even like it myself) rewrite it. As long as it works I will merge it.

The plan is to create an organization which will take over the development of the extension in the long run as soon as some core developers have emerged which I can give some elevated rights to.

I think the publishing step should still be done by me to avoid any malicious code being injected (there have just been to many chrome extension which started going bad after a maintainer switch).

[afterdelight]

how much cut will i get if i sell the program for 10k? please contact me further at [email protected] ,
don't worry too much about malicious codes if you sell it for a high price

[stubkan]

I really appreciate the effort you are taking to keep this project open source and free of consumerism money-grabbing. It is a rare thing now, and I salute you. I kept using this app as I couldn't find any others that didn't have dodgy code.

I believe keeping this project on github and just adding suitable project collaborators can keep the project moving forward, perhaps only switching branch owner sometime down the road after someone has proved themselves? Github itself lends itself well to the open source philosophy and keeps the code transparent.

I'll have a look and see if I can figure out how to re-target the new instagram video format and possibly make a PR.

[nemobis]

The plan is to create an organization which will take over the development of the extension in the long run

Thanks! Using https://opencollective.com/ can be a simple way to have a fiscal sponsor/hosting org without too much paperwork.

[auanasgheps]

So something has changed.

[TomK32]

So something has changed.

Looks like it, but sadly the new owner hides behind anonymity, is only updating the (more popular) extension for Chrome and doesn't update the repo here. So I expect it won't be too long before malware creeps into the chrome extension. Another nice project down the drain due to greed.

[desbest]

Looks like it, but sadly the new owner hides behind anonymity, is only updating the (more popular) extension for Chrome and doesn't update the repo here. So I expect it won't be too long before malware creeps into the chrome extension. Another nice project down the drain due to greed.

@TomK32 I disagree.
Not making it open source, isn't always likely for the purpose of inserting malware.
To uphold the functionality, capability and efficiency of the extension, in the long-term, rather than the short-term, it should not be open source.
And if it doesn't work, it makes it harder to push malware in the first place. Wouldn't you want it to work first, for as long as possible?

Expecting the updated extension to be open source and available on github, is naive. Absolute naivety.

All instagram employees will do, is check out the source code of the github repository, to then patch the vulnerabilities and attack vectors, which allow their website to be scraped, making the extension's workarounds redundant and useless.
It doesn't matter how many workarounds we make, if the extension is open source, as instagram will make our job as programmers, increasingly harder and obstructive.
Instagram employees can look at open source code but we can't look at theirs.
Under this cat and mouse game, the only real winner eventually, when everything is said and done, will be instagram.
Instagram will just keep making it harder and harder for us to make workarounds for.

This extension should NEVER of been open source from Day 1. That decision was absolute naivety, as if instagram wouldn't evolve their anti-scrape detection

See this blog post for details of how making an alternative instagram frontend viewer, open source, ultimately led to its demise to be no longer viable.

[TomK32]

This extension should NEVER of been open source from Day 1. That decision was absolute naivety, as if instagram wouldn't evolve their anti-scrape detection

Instagram only cares about it if you dig into their ad money, and displaying feeds the way Bibliogram sure did. Meanwhile the downloader only works on instagram's website meaning the users of the extension will still see the ads that instagram displays.

Personally I mistrust browser extensions that aren't open source (letting aside the question of licensing) a lot and use only two addons in Firefox that don't have that checkmark from Firefox itself.

[TomK32]

By the way, I do wonder if deleting the LICENSE as done in this commit was actually allowed by the license? 90f2450

Also, the parent commit would be a great starting place to develop a clean open source fork without the suspicion of malware attached.

[auanasgheps]

@TomK32 consider that there are a couple of PRs that would also fix a couple of annoyances. I do hope somebody takes on the development!

[desbest]

Instagram only cares about it if you dig into their ad money, and displaying feeds the way Bibliogram sure did. Meanwhile the downloader only works on instagram's website meaning the users of the extension will still see the ads that instagram displays.

@TomK32 Never underestimate a billionaire capitalist's ability to become more greedy 😉💁‍♀️

[nemobis]

Trying to apply a variant of Hanlon's razor... maybe the new maintainer just didn't have time yet to update everything. There's a link to a named person's PayPal in the donation field. The old LICENSE file contained the previous maintainer's name, maybe it was removed just for that reason; a compatible license will hopefully be added soon.

I'd be happy to donate if the new maintainer confirms this will stay (L)GPL, that the sponsor link is correct and that they'll try to update the Firefox extension.

[TomK32]

The LICENSE was remove a year ago, months before even this issue was opened. The paypal link on the repo page is still to the original maintainer.

[nemobis]

Ah you're right, I just checked my receipts and my previous donation(s) went to that name.

[ghost]

Anyone know who is the new owner and how to contact? I tried to contact the email [email protected] but it doesn't exist

[TomK32]

Classy, they have a typo in the email on the chromium website and it should be [email protected]

Btw, I'm working from an older version that still had the open source license attached, not working yet but once it does I'll put it onto the firefox addon website https://github.com/TomK32/InstaDownloader2023/

[ghost]

Classy, they have a typo in the email on the chromium website and it should be [email protected]

Btw, I'm working from an older version that still had the open source license attached, not working yet but once it does I'll put it onto the firefox addon website https://github.com/TomK32/InstaDownloader2023/

Thanks. Could you possibly get it work on Firefox nightly mobile with custom extensions support too? Afair, the IG downloader didn't download anything when pressing download button. once working, I would be happy to ditch Yandex browser.