Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world, with millions of users sharing photos, videos, and stories every day. Its massive user base makes it a valuable resource for Instagram OSINT, where investigators, researchers, and analysts use publicly available data to gain insights. Public profiles, posts, and interactions can reveal useful information about people, organizations, and online communities.
Lampyre simplifies this process by collecting and analyzing Instagram data in one place. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use Lampyre to research Instagram accounts, uncover connections, and identify patterns that might not be visible at first glance.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can start investigating Instagram accounts using Lampyre’s OSINT capabilities. But before we dive in, let’s first answer the question: What is Instagram OSINT?
What is Instagram OSINT?
Instagram OSINT refers to the practice of collecting and analyzing publicly available data from Instagram to gain insights into people, groups, or events. OSINT stands for “Open-Source Intelligence,” which means the information is gathered from sources that are openly accessible on the internet, not from private or hacked accounts.
On Instagram, this data can include profile details, posts, hashtags, comments, likes, tagged accounts, and even geolocation information if it is made public. Investigators, journalists, researchers, and businesses use Instagram OSINT to track trends, verify identities, uncover networks, or study online communities. Because Instagram is built around visuals and social interactions, it often reveals connections and behavioral patterns that may not be obvious at first glance.
Using a OSINT tools helps streamline the process by automating searches, mapping relationships, and organizing the results in one place. This makes Instagram OSINT more efficient and reduces the time needed to dig through large amounts of content manually.
How to Use Lampyre for Instagram Research
First, open the Lampyre app and start a new project. Once the project loads, you will be redirected to the dashboard, where you can navigate to Windows and select List of Requests, or use the shortcut Ctrl + Y. In the list view, you can search either by Criteria or by Tasks. Simply type in Instagram, and Lampyre will display all Instagram-related tasks that you can run.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be checking a celebrity’s Instagram account. As an example, locate the option “Instagram account info by account username or ID.” This request will fetch all available extended information on an Instagram account by its ID or username (or even a list of IDs or usernames). Note that this request does not provide geolocation data or details about users tagged in the posts of the account.
To demonstrate, let’s use Taylor Swift’s Instagram account. Simply enter her username into the request and wait for the Lampyre app to crawl her profile.
After a short wait, Lampyre will display the basic information about the profile along with any hyperlinks from the bio, which you can click directly within the app. The results are shown in two main tabs: one for profile information and another for profile statistics, such as follower count, number of posts, and tags. In some cases, users also have their contact information linked to their profile, which can provide even more insights for your investigation.
Now let’s return to our data. On the right side of the navigation panel, you can change the way the results are displayed by going to Schema, selecting all elements, and clicking Run. This will generate a new, graph-like view of the data. To dig deeper into Taylor Swift’s account, right-click on her profile in the graph, which will open a new window with additional options. From here, you can use the Request window at the bottom, type in Instagram, select “Instagram post info…”, and then click Run to gather more detailed information about her posts.
After running the request, Lampyre will display a much larger set of information about the account’s posts. This includes details such as who was tagged, who collaborated on the posts, which posts gained the most attention, and when and where they were published. On the right-hand table, you can also sort the data in different ways, such as by the number of likes or comments. Returning to the graph view, there is another powerful Instagram OSINT feature: if the account has tagged friends in their posts, you can locate those profiles on the graph, right-click on them, and run a search within the same graph. This allows you to expand your Instagram profile analysis and uncover connections that might otherwise be missed.
You can also use Lampyre’s geolocation feature to check whether a person has used any geo tags in their Instagram posts. If available, this data will show you where the posts were made, adding another layer of insight to your Instagram OSINT investigation.
Now let’s turn to the Instagram Recognize Objects in Photo table, which can be found in the folder panel on the left. By opening it, you will see a table view that lists details about the images in the account. For example, you can quickly check how many posts contain cats, shoes, or other recognizable objects. This feature is especially useful for Instagram OSINT because it helps identify patterns and recurring themes in a user’s visual content.
The examples in this tutorial only scratch the surface of what you can achieve with Lampyre when performing Instagram OSINT. From gathering basic profile information to analyzing posts, exploring tagged connections, reviewing geolocation data, and even detecting objects in photos, Lampyre makes it possible to uncover insights that would be difficult to find manually.
Whether you are an investigator, researcher, or simply someone interested in understanding online behavior, Instagram OSINT can reveal valuable patterns and relationships. With Lampyre, all of this data is collected and visualized in one place, giving you the ability to move from raw information to actionable intelligence much faster.
If you are ready to explore deeper connections and conduct your own Instagram profile analysis, download Lampyre and try it out yourself.