The simplest and surest way to go would be to contact Instagram don't you think?

Yes, I did think, so did my students; there is no way to contact them, particularly if you're in Portugal, they are very elusive and avoid such contacts, which is part of the Facebook culture. We've tried.

Thank you.

Here are their policies https://www.instagram.com/developer/ (I don't see any info that told you need a commercial account to access API):

Before you start using the API Platform, we have a few guidelines that we'd like to tell you about. Please make sure to read the full Platform Policy. Here's what you'll read about:

Thanks to all of respondents; and especially to D. N. H. Thanh , i appreciate that but those are simply the guidelines, not the process itself; instagram has a procedure if you want to develop API, and it includes for instance a video presentation of your objectives. But academic research is not about app development, and so it involves no commercial interest for instagram nor its users, my student told me that it has become increasingly difficult to propose development of a research API

Hi Paulo. Did you manage to find an answer to this question/process you were seeking? I'd be interested to know the current status for accessing the Instagram API platform for research purposes.

What app do you use for mining Instagram?

Hello, sorry for the delay in answering;

a couple years ago, me and a student had the help of a computer software technician who could deal with the Instagram APIs, so he developed his own app just from that; but since then the API library has been closed to anyone but developers. So we're not currently using any app; i do admit that some companies provide that effort, and their apps mins instagram, but for business purposes. Is there no way other than become a client for those companies?

Paulo L

Instagram suddenly restricted access to the public API without warning On April 2018, the new Instagram Graph API is much more restrictive than the older Instagram API platform that will be a challenge to collect public data on Instagram. Instead of API and XPath-liking technologies, Podargos provides you with Instagram data for any search criteria by using Pattern Recongition based on machine learning. If you have any interest in it, please access to Data Sample Index -- Podargos Data (https://bit.ly/2qrL7de).

It depends on what kind of data do you exactly need for your academic research.

Do you want to collect data on certain hashtags, for instance, how many times where they mentioned and what was their reach?

Do you need sentiment analysis for different keywords?

Or maybe you need to count mentions of specific Instagram accounts to see how many times people mention them in their Instagram posts?

I won't be able to tell you a lot about collecting such data from the technological standpoint, but let me tell you there are tools that can do this for you, as long as the examples above are similar to the data you need.

You could do this with a social media monitoring tool like Brand24 (https://brand24.com).

Once you create a monitoring project, the tool collects mentions of a given hashtag/keyword/account name on Instagram and loads them into the dashboard that helps you analyse different metrics such as a number of mentions, social media reach, interactions, such as likes, shares and comments, etc.

Each mention has a few pieces of information assigned to it, like: the ID, exact time and date, the author and his influence score, a picture and the content of a given Instagram caption, link to the orignal mention, sentiment analysis, as well as metrics such as social media reach, follower count of the author, etc.

Let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to clarify!

I would like to automatically collect photographs (together with information, hashtags, text) from the explore page of Instagram. Do you believe that for an engineer it is possible through Instagram API?

I Agree With Emma Lee