Do you ever wonder what you’ve posted on Instagram? With this tip, you will download all the media files you have ever shared via the social platform. So are your stories.
By Erik NusselderSocial media is often fleeting: you share something and the next day you have already forgotten it. Scrolling through your posts on Instagram is still relatively easy, but your Stories disappear completely after a day. And that’s a shame, because there are often nice memories in between.
But all those Stories will not be deleted. Parent company Meta saves everything you’ve ever posted. That may not be great for your privacy, but it does mean you can get all the memories back.
If you want to have a good look at it, you can download everything in one go. But you may have another reason to request your entire catalog, for example because you want to delete your Instagram profile. The recent changes to the platform, with more focus on video, may be a reason for some users to stop altogether.
Request the download via the website
To request a download of all your data, you must log in to the Instagram website on a PC via your web browser. Click on your profile picture at the top right. There you will find the option ‘Settings’. Select ‘Privacy and Security’ here. In the list on the right you will see the heading ‘Data download’. There you click on ‘Request download’.
Here you enter the e-mail address where you want to receive your photos and choose the file format. The easiest is to choose HTML, because you can browse through an HTML file very easily. Click on ‘Next’ and enter your password.
According to Instagram, it can then take two weeks before you receive an email, but in practice it turns out that you can receive it within a day.
After downloading you can browse through all kinds of folders
You will receive a zip file via e-mail, which you then extract to your computer. It is a large file with all kinds of different folders that can seem a bit overwhelming. Did you choose HTML? Then there is also a file with the name ‘Index’ in between. When you open this, you will see a clear list of the data via your browser.
Here you can see everything Instagram knows about you, such as all the comments you’ve ever posted or the ad topics the app serves you most often. For your photos and videos you have to scroll down quite a bit. Under the heading ‘Content’ you will find your normal posts under ‘Posts’ and your Stories under ‘Stories’. You can also view all the profile pictures you’ve ever had.
You can also find the photos and videos separately on your PC. In the extracted folders from the zip file, choose the folder ‘Media’. Here you will find the folders ‘Posts’, ‘Profile’ and ‘Stories’, which are again subdivided by month. In those folders you will find all the media files that you have shared in that month.
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