Question about "ethical" scraping

I am aware scraping in general is considered unethical and can often be against ToS.

This isn't true at all.

Scraping publicly available information is perfectly ethical, and has been ruled legal by courts. As long as the data is freely available without a login or some other security feature you can feel free to scrape as long as you are not somehow spamming requests unreasonably.

If you're scraping Instagram while logged in though, well, they can and almost certainly do detect that and can and will rate limit and/or block you.

I'm going to push back on your claim that you are only trying to automate a process you do manually for a mood board. The only reason to automate something like this is if you are trying to scrape bulk data. How many images are you trying to scrape and how is your script identifying them? If you're trying to scrape all images from an account, or all images with a certain hashtag or something like that and sending requests at high speed, you may well be getting blocked.

/r/learnpython Thread