How to save all your old Instagram stories and posts
You can keep your pictures and videos outside of the app. The post How to save all your old Instagram stories and posts appeared first on Popular Science.
We put a lot of our lives on Instagram—special occasions, special people, perhaps the odd special meme or two. But in between all the posting there’s not much time to think about what’s happening to these photos and videos. What if you decide to leave Instagram? What if you want to bring back memories in another app?
Instagram actually does a good job at saving your pictures and video clips—even those ones in your story, which are set to disappear from view after 24 hours. Whether you want to keep all snaps saved for posterity or need to revisit one memory in particular, you’ve got options.
Saving new Instagram posts to your phone
The easiest way of making sure everything you post to Instagram is saved permanently is to save posts to your phone’s gallery—from there you can keep them and back them up to the cloud using Google Photos, Apple Photos, or whatever photo storage service you use.
There are settings inside the Instagram app to control this. Tap your profile picture (bottom right), then the menu button (top right): Choose Archiving and downloading, then turn on all four toggle switches. This means both posts and stories get saved to your phone’s library, and stories and live broadcasts get permanently saved in Instagram’s own archive too.
When it comes to stories and reels, you can save these to your phone manually too. For stories, tap the three dots (top right) then Save. For reels, just before posting, you can scroll across the icons at the bottom of the screen to find the download option (the downward arrow): Tap this to save your reel.
That should cover everything in terms of getting your Instagram content saved to your phone, and from there you can move it anywhere. If you haven’t already enabled these features or forgotten to save something along the way, there are still methods for getting images and clips out of Instagram.
Saving existing Instagram posts
On the web, you can see everything you’ve posted to your Instagram profile by clicking Profile on the web: Keep scrolling to find the older posts, and click on any of them to bring up a bigger version. Click View archive at the top and you can see past stories, even if they’ve disappeared from view for your friends (and as long as you’ve enabled the save to archive option we mentioned above).
To save a picture on the web, click on it and then append “/media?size=l” to the URL in your browser’s address bar. This will then give you a full-size version of the image you can right-click on to save it to your computer. For bulk downloading, Esuit Photos Downloader for Instagram is a reliable browser extension option for Chrome and Edge. However, there’s no reliable way to download stories from the web.
It’s the opposite on mobile: There’s no easy way of saving your old posts from your profile page, other than taking a screenshot and then cropping, but you can save your stories. From your profile page, tap the menu button (top right), then Archive: Tap on a story to view it, then tap the three dots in the lower right corner and choose Save photo. This does depend on you having enabled story archiving though (see above).
Reels can be saved on mobile too, from the reels tab on your profile (the movie clapboard icon): Tap the reel to open it, then the share button (the paper airplane), then scroll to the right and choose Download. Both these story and reel options work separately to you downloading these posts as you create them.
There is another way to do this: Export all the data in your Instagram account. In the mobile app, tap your profile icon (bottom right), then the menu button (top right), then Accounts Center > Your information and permissions > Download your information > Download or transfer information and choose your account. Be sure to check All time as the date range and High as the media quality. On the web, you can find the same option via More > Settings.
When Instagram has collected all of your data, a download link will be sent to your registered email address, giving you access to a full collection of your Instagram photos and videos (and other data). You can then keep these files saved and backed up wherever you like.
The post How to save all your old Instagram stories and posts appeared first on Popular Science.
