Instagram is a social media powerhouse when it comes to photo and video sharing apps. It’s a handy tool for keeping up with your friends, family, and favorite celebrities’ day-to-day lives. It’s also a great tool to discover hot travel destinations, interesting products, and even cool recipes.
If you’re like me, then you’ve been an Instagrammer for over a decade. I first joined Instagram in my freshman year at college back in 2010. Back then, Instagram was a small start-up out of California, with only 1 million registered users. Fast forward to 2020, and that number has grown to more than 1 billion users.
In all those years, I’ve posted hundreds of photos and videos to my Instagram account. Many of which I no longer have because my former smartphone died. Which leads me to today’s topic on how to back up Instagram content.
How to save your Instagram content
Instagram makes it easy to post content on it’s platform, but it doesn’t make it easy to back-up it up. If you take a photo or video using Instagram’s built-in camera, the media will only be accessible on Instagram and won’t be stored anywhere on your phone. Thankfully Instagram does have an option for backing-up all of your data off Instagram.
- Open the Instagram app, click on your profile icon in the bottom right corner, then the hamburger icon in the top right corner, which will toggle a menu.
- Once the menu opens, click on the settings button at the bottom, then click the security button.
- Look for the menu item labeled “Download data” and click it. This will bring up a form where you can input your email address and have all of your Instagram account data sent to you. Hit the request download button and wait for Instagram to send you your data to download.
It can take up to 48 hours for Instagram to send you an email with a download link so be patient.
How to download individual Instagram photos and videos
Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t have a built-in option for saving individual posts. This means you’ll need to rely on third-party apps and phone functions for keeping videos and photos. In this section, we’re going to highlight a few options to help you back-up and download photos and videos off Instagram.
Web Options
The first web option we will cover is a clean, easy Instagram downloader named InstaOffline. This tool works for downloading images, videos, and private content off Instagram.
- Open the Instagram post with the image or video that you want to download.
- Copy the post URL by clicking the three dots in the top right corner of the post and selecting “Copy Link”.
- Head over to the Instaoffline website and paste the link on the homepage.
- Click the download button to generate the download links for the videos or images that you are trying to download.
Our second option is another web-based downloader name IG Downloader. As the name implies, this too is a tool specifically designed for saving content off Instagram. It has the option to save Instagram photos, videos, stories, highlights and IGTV. Using the website couldn’t be easier.
- Find the Instagram post containing the image or video that you want to download.
- Copy the post URL and paste it into the box on the homepage. Alternatively, you can type in an Instagram username, which will bring up the user’s posts.
- Once you’ve filled in the form, click the download button to generate the media’s download links.
- Click the download button to save the images or videos to your device’s gallery.
What’s particularly lovely about this downloader is that you can save multiple videos and images at once. You can also search for all recent posts from a user, which is a nice touch.
Taking a Screenshot
Taking a screenshot is another way to save images to your smartphone. This method works for most websites and apps, as all phones have the capability to take a screenshot. You can do this by pressing and holding the power and volume down buttons at the same time. Usually, you’ll know that the screenshot was captured because the phone will make a sound, or a message will be displayed on the screen. You can find saved screenshots in the gallery on your phone.
Tip: If you’re a frequent Facebook user, make sure to check out our article on saving Facebook videos.
The main problem with taking a screenshot is that the quality of the saved image usually isn’t as good as downloading and saving the real thing. So you might want to look into some of the alternatives that we mentioned.
Conclusion
Saving Instagram content isn’t hard if you know the steps for doing it. Follow the steps above to back-up all of your Instagram content or to save individual photos and videos. This way you’ll be able to look back on those memories at any time. Please remember to respect other people’s content and to give credit when do. If you have any questions let us know in the comments.
