🔐 New: sign in by bringing your Instagram session over from Chrome
- If you are already signed in to Instagram in Chrome, Social Prospector can now use that session instead of asking you to sign in again. This is for the people who get stuck at Instagram's login screen inside the app, or who cannot remember the password on an account they have been running for years.
- On a Mac, "Use my Chrome session" on the Settings screen does it in one click, with no login window and nothing to type. It reads the Instagram session Chrome already holds, checks with Instagram that it really is signed in, and only then uses it.
- On Windows, recent versions of Chrome lock their saved cookies to Chrome itself, so that one click route cannot work there. Rather than failing with something vague, Social Prospector now says exactly that and points you at the normal Login button.
- For anyone the one click route cannot serve, Settings > Advanced now has "Paste Chrome session". In Chrome, copy your Instagram cookies with a copy cookies extension, paste them in, and Social Prospector signs you in from those. This route works the same on Windows and on Mac.
- Whichever route you use, nothing is trusted blindly. Social Prospector asks Instagram to confirm the session is live, and saves it only if Instagram answers as the signed in account. A stale or expired copy is refused with a plain explanation rather than leaving you in a broken half signed in state.
🔎 Fixed: business accounts were quietly skipping your lead filters
- Enrich & Filter reads each lead's follower, following and post counts so it can drop the ones below the minimums you set. Instagram refuses that lookup for any profile carrying a business or creator category, and on a real prospect list of coaches, brands and agencies that is roughly a quarter of the people on it.
- Those leads came back marked "couldn't be checked" and were kept with a warning symbol. Nothing was lost, but your minimum follower, following and post settings never applied to them, so a list you had just filtered still contained the small and inactive accounts you had asked to exclude.
- Social Prospector now falls back to a second lookup that Instagram still answers, so those leads come back with real numbers and your filters apply to them like everyone else. In a real run of 138 leads, the 38 that could not be checked now all return counts.
- The warning symbol is still shown for genuine failures, such as a handle that no longer exists or a session that needs signing in again, so it now points at something you can act on instead of appearing on every business profile.
- Accounts using Instagram's default grey avatar are still detected and filtered on this path, using Instagram's own flag rather than a guess at the picture.
Questions? Reach out anytime at support@prospectorproducts.com