What is the Instagram Reels Scraper?
The InsightSocial Instagram Reels scraper is a free Chrome extension that exports a creator's reel history to CSV, Excel, or JSON — one row per reel, carrying the play count, likes, comments, thumbnail, posted date, the reel's own URL, and the caption and sound where Instagram publishes them. There is no Meta developer app to register, no access token, and no quota to budget against.
Reels are the one Instagram surface where the visible metric and the interesting metric are different things. Likes tell you who already follows the creator; plays tell you how far the reel travelled past them. A reel with 400 likes and 90,000 plays reached strangers. A reel with 400 likes and 4,000 plays did not. You cannot see that difference by scrolling a profile, and it is the difference that decides whether a format is worth copying or a creator is worth paying.
The catch is that Instagram splits a reel across two surfaces and gives neither one the whole picture. A creator's Reels tab reports the play count but carries no caption, no date, and no music. Their profile grid carries captions, dates, and audio but omits plays entirely. Read only one and you get half a row. This scraper walks both and joins them on the reel's id, which is why a single export answers "which of this creator's reels took off, and what was on them".
Who is it for?
- Creators auditing their own back catalogue by plays rather than by the likes the app puts in front of them
- Influencer marketers who want a creator's median play count across fifty reels instead of the one screenshot in a media kit
- Social media managers tracking how often a competitor ships reels and which of them break out
- Content strategists looking for the sounds and formats gaining reach in a niche while there is still room to use them
- Agencies building client performance reports without photographing a phone screen
- Analysts assembling reel datasets where plays, dates, and audio all need to be on the same row
Key Benefits
- Plays on every reel — captured from the Reels tab, the only surface Instagram serves them on
- The complete list, not the grid subset — creators share only a fraction of their reels to their profile; the Reels tab is everything
- Captions and sound joined on automatically — a second pass over the grid attaches them where they exist, with no second run to configure
- Sounds are their own source — open a track's audio page and export the reels using it
- The discovery feed is scrapeable too — snapshot what the
/reels/feed is pushing at you, audio track included - Honest about gaps — fields Instagram does not publish for a given reel come back empty rather than invented
How to Use the Instagram Reels Scraper
Step 1: Install the Extension
Add InsightSocial from the Chrome Web Store and pin the icon to your toolbar. It works inside the Instagram session you are already logged into and never asks for your password.
Step 2: Open the Reels Tab
Navigate to instagram.com/{username}/reels — the Reels tab on any public profile. This is the surface that matters: opening the profile grid instead gets you the reels the creator chose to cross-post, which on some accounts is a small minority of what they actually published.
Two other reel sources work the same way. A sound's page, instagram.com/reels/audio/..., which you reach by tapping a track name inside a reel, exports the reels using that track. And instagram.com/reels/ — the discovery feed itself — snapshots what the algorithm is serving you.
Step 3: Open the Sidebar
Click the InsightSocial icon. The sidebar reads the URL, recognises the Reels tab, and offers Reels + Play Counts.
Step 4: Set a Count
Pick 25, 50, or 100, or type your own number. The run stops there, or earlier if the creator has posted fewer. For influencer vetting, 50 is usually enough to get a stable median without one viral outlier dragging the average; for a full content audit, take the whole catalogue.
Step 5: Start Scraping
Click "Start Scraping". The scraper reads the Reels tab first, collecting plays and engagement, then passes over the profile grid to attach captions and audio to whichever reels appear on both. That second pass stops once it has paged past your oldest reel rather than scrolling a deep profile to its end for no further matches.
Step 6: Sort by Plays, Then Export
Sort by play count before exporting — that ordering is the entire point of the scrape, and it is not an ordering Instagram offers you anywhere in the app. Then export to CSV, Excel, or JSON. The session syncs to your private InsightSocial portal, so you can reopen and re-export it later without running the scrape again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do most reels come back without a caption?
Because Instagram only publishes captions on the profile grid, and creators cross-post a fraction of their reels there. On one account we tested it was 91 of 108; on another, 6 of 48. The rows without captions are not failures — they are reels that exist only on the Reels tab, and they still carry plays, likes, comments, thumbnail, and date. An export that showed only the captioned ones would be hiding most of the creator's output.
How do I judge a creator from the export?
Take the median play count, not the mean, and look at the spread. A creator whose reels cluster between 20,000 and 60,000 plays has a reliable audience. One whose median is 3,000 with a single 800,000 outlier had one lucky reel, and that outlier is usually the one in their media kit. Divide plays by follower count for a rough reach multiple, which you can get from the Instagram Profile Scraper, and compare like for like across a shortlist.
Can I find trending sounds this way?
Yes, from two directions. Export a set of creators in your niche and pivot on the Audio Track column to see which sounds recur among their best-performing reels. Or work backwards: open a sound's audio page, export the reels using it, and read the posted dates. A track with reels spread over six months has already peaked; one with everything from the last fortnight is still climbing.
Does the discovery feed give me play counts?
No. Instagram returns no play or view count on the /reels/ feed — both fields are genuinely null there, so nothing on that surface promises them. What the feed does carry is the sound on every row, plus captions, authors, and engagement. Use it to sample what the algorithm is pushing; use a creator's Reels tab when you need plays.
How do I get the comments on a reel?
That is a separate, per-reel scrape. Open the individual reel and run the Instagram Comment Scraper, which pulls the full thread including nested replies. The practical pattern is two passes: export the reel list here, sort by plays or comment count, then pull comments on the handful that actually generated conversation.
Does this work for TikTok as well?
Not from this page — TikTok is a separate scraper with its own surfaces. If you are comparing short-form performance across both platforms, the TikTok Video Scraper covers the equivalent ground there, and both export to the same formats so the files line up.
How many creators can I export per month?
One creator's Reels tab is one session, and a session captures as many reels as you asked for:
- Free plan: 30 sessions per month
- Pro Monthly: 300 sessions for $4.99/mo
- Pro Yearly: 3,600 sessions for $47.88/year ($3.99/mo)
For the other Instagram surfaces — followers, hashtags, bio-link emails — see the full Instagram scraper overview.