It looks like it just hits https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/... every time you scroll down so if you scroll too fast it just hammers it and throttles your requests to that endpoint.

Note id of user (e.g. 1954202703). this is the "id": value in the url.

Note end_cursor. This is used for the "after": value in the url

Note rhx_gis. This is used to create the "X-Instagram-GIS:" header.

Looking at archive.org, it seems as recently as last year, end_cursor was once all that was needed.

2. Fetch js from ProfilePageContainer url in 1st page (e.g., https://www.instagram.com/static/bundles/base/ProfilePageCon...)

Note queryId (e.g. 42323d64886122307be10013ad2dcc44)

This is used for "query_hash" in the url.

3. Create header "X-Instagram-GIS:"

Apparently this is some MD5 hash of rhx_gis and the query string variables according to this source:

https://www.diggernaut.com/blog/how-to-scrape-pages-infinite...

However a little experimentation revealed that generation of rhx_gis or this hash must also incorporate the user-agent string -- change any character in the user-agent string and the request will fail.

They also put IP address and a Unix time value in a cookie but the cookie can be deleted and the request still succeeds.

For example the final url for the first 12 photos is:

https://www.instagram.com/graphql/query/?query_hash=42323d64...

Overall, seems not too much work for someone who really wants to automate retrieval of Instagram photos. These requests for successive groups of 12 can be RFC 2616 pipelined over a single connection. Not long ago and for some number of years, it was even easier (e.g. just use end_cursor value as "max_id" in url).