How to avoid unable to locate element with 'if' statement in Python (selenium)?

I'm accessing multiple instagram pages and clicking on 'following' boxes. Some accounts are private and the following/followers boxes aren't clickable. What i want to do is create a 'if' condition to avoid these unclickable situations. What I'm trying to do is coded below:

if driver.find_element_by_xpath('//div[@class="QlxVY"]/h2') == None:
      #do something (click on 'following' box and etc.)

This path above only exists in private account pages. It locates the "this account is private" phrase. So, my reasoning is: if the phrase do not appear, its because the account isn't private and i can keep going and click on the 'following' box. The problem is that the '==' operator followed by 'None' isn't working. When i reach a public account, i get the following error (my 'if' statement is ignored):

selenium.common.exceptions.NoSuchElementException: Message: Unable to locate element: //div[@class="QlxVY"]/h2

Am i using 'None' wrong? I need to use another thing? I already did some research and i didn't find clues about it... only posts talking about tips to locate a element that is previously hidden. Thank's!

Solution

You can try any one of these two methods:-

1- By checking length of element

element = driver.find_elements_by_xpath('//div[@class="QlxVY"]/h2')
if len(element)==0:
    print('Element not Present ')
    #do something (click on 'following' box and etc.)

2- By catching NoSuchElementException

from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException

try:
    if driver.find_element_by_xpath('//div[@class="QlxVY"]/h2'):
        print('Element found')
    
except NoSuchElementException:
    print('Element not Present')
    #do something (click on 'following' box and etc.)