You want to build a social media following, so you go looking for people and brands who are already successful – accounts with big followings, posts that have attracted tons of attention.
You’re looking at an instagram profile with hundreds-of-thousands of followers, and you’re wondering, “How did they get to where they are now? What were they posting when they started?” You’d like to see if there’s anything you can learn from their post history, see if there are patterns you can identify to help your own growth.
To see the entirety of a given profile’s content, you could just scroll all the way down to the very first posts on that profile. The problem with doing this, though, is that Instagram makes it time consuming – posts will only load so quickly, and when a profile has thousands of posts, you’re stuck in a slow process of scrolling, waiting for content to load, scrolling more, waiting more, and so on.
Here’s where our little hack comes in: we’re going to load all of an Instagram profile’s posts automatically, quickly, all the way to the very first post.
To do this, all we need is a web browser and a tiny bit of code. ****
Note: If you don’t know anything about coding, don’t worry! This guide is intended for people with no technical expertise. Anyone can follow this guide.
The trick we’re going to use is quick and easy. Let’s get started.
Step 1: Visit Instagram In A Browser
We’re going to utilize a feature within our browser called “Inspect Element.” This means that we need to use a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer to visit the Instagram profile we want to view.
Go to instagram.com and search for the profile you want to view, or copy and paste the URL into your browser.
Once you’re viewing the profile you want to see all posts for, move onto Step 2.
Step 2: Open Inspect Element
We need to access a part of our browser called Inspect Element. This a feature of most modern web browsers, including Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Safari, and Arc.
Opening Inspect Element In Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Arc
To access Inspect Element in Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Arc, simply right-click on the page you have open, and in the context menu (aka dropdown menu) that pops up next to your cursor, select “Inspect.”
Opening Inspect Element In Safari
To access Inspect Element in Safari, first go to Settings, then to Advanced, and then check the box that says “Show Develop menu in menu bar.” After doing this, you can right click on a page and select Inspect Element in the context menu, just as you would in other browsers.
Opening Inspect Element (Video Walkthrough)
By right-clicking and choosing Inspect Element, you should be able to open the Inspect Element panel in your browser, which will look something like this (example taken from Brave, which is similar to Chrome):
Now that we have the Inspect Element panel open, we can continue to Step 3, whereby we’ll simply copy and paste two code snippets into the Inspect Element Console section.
Step 3: Run JavaScript Code In Console
Inside of the Inspect Element panel, there’s tab named “Console.” Click on it. This is where we’re going to put our code, which is written in a programming language called JavaScript.
The First Piece Of Code
The code we’re going to run in the Console consists of two pieces.
The first piece will make the entirety of the Instagram account’s posts load. After all of the posts have loaded, we’ll use the second piece to halt the first bit of code. Without this second piece, we can run into some wonky behavior when we go to scroll through all of the posts we’ve loaded.
Copy and paste this first piece of code into the console window, and then hit Enter.
Once you hit enter, the console should return a unique number. Take note of this number – we’re going to need it in our second piece of code.
After pasting this first piece of code and hitting enter, the page will begin to scroll and load posts automatically.
Depending on how many posts an account has, it might take a few minutes for the posts to load…might I suggest standing up for a stretch, or a snack?
The Second Piece Of Code
When all of the posts have been loaded, copy and paste the second piece of code into the Console window – and be sure to replace “your number here” with the number returned after entering the first piece of code – and hit Enter again.
Here’s the second piece of code:
clearInterval(your number here);
And here’s a screenshot showing the first piece of code, the number it returned, and the second piece of code using that number:
Finally, for clarity’s sake, here’s a video showing all of the steps above (though, in the video, I don’t let all of the posts load). It might be slightly hard to follow along as my console was filled with some junk, but you can see me paste the first piece of code in, see some posts load, and then see me paste the second piece of code and edit it with the number I talked about above.
Step 5: Scroll Until Your Heart’s Content!
If you did all of the above steps, you should be looking at an Instagram profile with all of its posts loaded. Now you can scroll away!
Troubleshooting
If You Can’t Scroll Up The Page After All Posts Have Loaded…
The first time I ran the code above, I forgot to run the second piece (included in Step 4), and I couldn’t scroll through the page without it jumping around.
If you’re experiencing this, make sure you input the second piece of code, and before running it, edit the content of the parenthesis to include the number the console returns after you run the first piece of code.
If You Can’t Find The Console Section…
I tried to give some brief explainers on how to find the Console in various browsers, but if you’re still having trouble, a quick Google like “How to open Inspect Element Console in [insert your browser]” should do you well. If you’ve never used Inspect Element before, everything that pops up on your screen can be a bit intimidating. Don’t worry – you’ll get it in no time.
How To Load Instagram Posts Automatically
A Better Way To Scroll
Let’s set the scene:
You want to build a social media following, so you go looking for people and brands who are already successful – accounts with big followings, posts that have attracted tons of attention.
You’re looking at an instagram profile with hundreds-of-thousands of followers, and you’re wondering, “How did they get to where they are now? What were they posting when they started?” You’d like to see if there’s anything you can learn from their post history, see if there are patterns you can identify to help your own growth.
To see the entirety of a given profile’s content, you could just scroll all the way down to the very first posts on that profile. The problem with doing this, though, is that Instagram makes it time consuming – posts will only load so quickly, and when a profile has thousands of posts, you’re stuck in a slow process of scrolling, waiting for content to load, scrolling more, waiting more, and so on.
Here’s where our little hack comes in: we’re going to load all of an Instagram profile’s posts automatically, quickly, all the way to the very first post.
To do this, all we need is a web browser and a tiny bit of code. ****
Note: If you don’t know anything about coding, don’t worry! This guide is intended for people with no technical expertise. Anyone can follow this guide.
The trick we’re going to use is quick and easy. Let’s get started.
Step 1: Visit Instagram In A Browser
We’re going to utilize a feature within our browser called “Inspect Element.” This means that we need to use a web browser on a laptop or desktop computer to visit the Instagram profile we want to view.
Go to instagram.com and search for the profile you want to view, or copy and paste the URL into your browser.
Once you’re viewing the profile you want to see all posts for, move onto Step 2.
Step 2: Open Inspect Element
We need to access a part of our browser called Inspect Element. This a feature of most modern web browsers, including Chrome, Brave, Firefox, Safari, and Arc.
Opening Inspect Element In Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Arc
To access Inspect Element in Chrome, Brave, Firefox, or Arc, simply right-click on the page you have open, and in the context menu (aka dropdown menu) that pops up next to your cursor, select “Inspect.”
Opening Inspect Element In Safari
To access Inspect Element in Safari, first go to Settings, then to Advanced, and then check the box that says “Show Develop menu in menu bar.” After doing this, you can right click on a page and select Inspect Element in the context menu, just as you would in other browsers.
Opening Inspect Element (Video Walkthrough)
By right-clicking and choosing Inspect Element, you should be able to open the Inspect Element panel in your browser, which will look something like this (example taken from Brave, which is similar to Chrome):
Now that we have the Inspect Element panel open, we can continue to Step 3, whereby we’ll simply copy and paste two code snippets into the Inspect Element Console section.
Step 3: Run JavaScript Code In Console
Inside of the Inspect Element panel, there’s tab named “Console.” Click on it. This is where we’re going to put our code, which is written in a programming language called JavaScript.
The First Piece Of Code
The code we’re going to run in the Console consists of two pieces.
The first piece will make the entirety of the Instagram account’s posts load. After all of the posts have loaded, we’ll use the second piece to halt the first bit of code. Without this second piece, we can run into some wonky behavior when we go to scroll through all of the posts we’ve loaded.
Here’s the first piece of code:
Copy and paste this first piece of code into the console window, and then hit Enter.
Once you hit enter, the console should return a unique number. Take note of this number – we’re going to need it in our second piece of code.
After pasting this first piece of code and hitting enter, the page will begin to scroll and load posts automatically.
Depending on how many posts an account has, it might take a few minutes for the posts to load…might I suggest standing up for a stretch, or a snack?
The Second Piece Of Code
When all of the posts have been loaded, copy and paste the second piece of code into the Console window – and be sure to replace “your number here” with the number returned after entering the first piece of code – and hit Enter again.
Here’s the second piece of code:
And here’s a screenshot showing the first piece of code, the number it returned, and the second piece of code using that number:
Finally, for clarity’s sake, here’s a video showing all of the steps above (though, in the video, I don’t let all of the posts load). It might be slightly hard to follow along as my console was filled with some junk, but you can see me paste the first piece of code in, see some posts load, and then see me paste the second piece of code and edit it with the number I talked about above.
Step 5: Scroll Until Your Heart’s Content!
If you did all of the above steps, you should be looking at an Instagram profile with all of its posts loaded. Now you can scroll away!
Troubleshooting
If You Can’t Scroll Up The Page After All Posts Have Loaded…
The first time I ran the code above, I forgot to run the second piece (included in Step 4), and I couldn’t scroll through the page without it jumping around.
If you’re experiencing this, make sure you input the second piece of code, and before running it, edit the content of the parenthesis to include the number the console returns after you run the first piece of code.
If You Can’t Find The Console Section…
I tried to give some brief explainers on how to find the Console in various browsers, but if you’re still having trouble, a quick Google like “How to open Inspect Element Console in [insert your browser]” should do you well. If you’ve never used Inspect Element before, everything that pops up on your screen can be a bit intimidating. Don’t worry – you’ll get it in no time.