Instagram posts can showcase the city highlights, uncover the aspirations of residents, and illustrate a variety of their activities in public spaces.

While we should not expect it to deliver an accurate picture of reality, Instagram can still be a valuable source of data for city research. Scrolling through feeds and exploring hashtags can be endless fun for city researchers. But how to speed it up by automating the extraction of thousands of posts for further data mining?

We automated the extraction of posts by developing a Python package that facilitates the process of:

• scraping posts from Instagram API
• preprocessing and cleaning
• analysis and visualisation

See in detail how we explored Bratislava parks using Python and Instagram API.