curious why you are scraping instagram for this purpose and not something like flickr which has a reasonable public api and tagged creative commons licensed images that are suitable for your ML purposes. at the very least, it's worth investigating archive.org's many freely licensed archives for this sort of thing.
as somebody that has fielded numerous emails from friends asking me to remove tagged photos of them from flickr, i sort of wonder about the ethics of harvesting these sorts of images from instagram, a community whose norms sort of revolve around semi-public sharing of photos. I don't doubt that there's some rationale for harvesting the images from ig, but aside from thumbing your nose at their TOS, it feels like it's a greater violation of trust to harvest your friends and strangers photos for an ML project without their informed consent.
at the very least, it's worth considering pointing your app's gaze at a set of images licensed for any purpose whatsoever rather than ones that are explicitly licensed All Rights Reserved by their respective photographers.
as somebody that has fielded numerous emails from friends asking me to remove tagged photos of them from flickr, i sort of wonder about the ethics of harvesting these sorts of images from instagram, a community whose norms sort of revolve around semi-public sharing of photos. I don't doubt that there's some rationale for harvesting the images from ig, but aside from thumbing your nose at their TOS, it feels like it's a greater violation of trust to harvest your friends and strangers photos for an ML project without their informed consent.
at the very least, it's worth considering pointing your app's gaze at a set of images licensed for any purpose whatsoever rather than ones that are explicitly licensed All Rights Reserved by their respective photographers.