Ctrl-F For Instagram

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  Front-End Homepage

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  Results page

Inspiration

We were casually scrolling through Instagram pages the other day, and Ashley simply stated "I wish that we could just peruse through all these posts and find what we want -- it's wasting so much time having to scroll through all of them." Right then and there, I realized the same thing -- why wasn't this possible yet? This would be so useful in day to day life, and travel especially.

What it does

It utilizes a web scraper in the backend written in python, that uses Selenium & Webdriver in order to create an automated script that goes into Instagram, and extracts JSON-ified data of a user. How this works with the front-end is that users input the username and keywords, and then it gets fed to the web scraper, which takes these inputs and returns an image for each post that had the keyword in its caption. The results are displayed on a separate page.

How we built it

As written above, we build it using mainly Python, Javascript, HTML, CSS, and many packages in our web scraper, such as selenium, selenium stealth, webdriver, etc. The python script and front-end website were connected using Node.js' child process module.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of trouble trying to bypass Instagram's bot detection feature. However, after we found out about covering our tracks and utilizing selenium stealth to put a mask on our identity, it was a lot smoother.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are super proud of the web scraper that we built, and the beautifully designed user interface.

What we learned

We learned that there's a lot more to these projects than actually thinking about the design and assembling all the code -- debugging the code is by far the most arduous and tedious task to a project.

What's next for Ctrl-F For Instagram

Maybe some sort of ML or NLP to process images, so that there could maybe be some sort of image processing.

Built With

• chromedriver
• css
• html
• javascript
• python
• selenium
• seleniumstealth
• webdriver