ig_dl

A lightweight, high-performance command-line tool written in Rust to automatically download all unique posts (videos and images) from a public Instagram account.

How It Works

Standard headless scrapers are often rate-limited or blocked by Instagram's login walls. ig_dl works around this by:

1. Identifying the internal numeric User ID of the target account by mimicking an official Instagram mobile client request.
2. Utilizing the powerful gallery-dl under the hood to bypass standard frontend restrictions and download directly via the id: extraction method.

Prerequisites

• Rust: Ensure you have cargo and rustc installed.
• gallery-dl: ig_dl requires gallery-dl to be installed and available in your system's PATH.

Installation

Clone the repository and build the binary:

git clone https://github.com/ajsb85/ig_dl.git
cd ig_dl
cargo build --release

The compiled binary will be available in target/release/ig_dl.

Usage

Simply run the binary and pass the target Instagram username as an argument:

./ig_dl <username>

Example:

./ig_dl mnfilmandphotos

The downloads will automatically be saved into a structured directory created by gallery-dl (e.g., ./gallery-dl/instagram/<username>/).

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.