How to Download and Save All Your Instagram Photos

If you’ve used Instagram for a while, you’ve probably built up quite a collection of your own photos, as well as those you’ve saved from others. You can always view them on your Instagram page, but what if you want to save copies as a backup?

Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to save Instagram photos. We’ll show you how to download and save photos from Instagram on iPhone, Android, and your computer.

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How to Download All Your Instagram Photos at Once

If you want to download everything you’ve posted on Instagram in one go, you can use Instagram’s simple tool on your computer or phone. To use it, first log into Instagram on your desktop or laptop, or open the mobile app.

On mobile, tap the Profile icon in the bottom-right, followed by the three-line Menu in the upper-right. From the menu that appears, choose Your activity. Then scroll down and hit Download your information. While you’re here, note that this page is useful for managing what you do on Instagram.

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On desktop, it’s a similar procedure. Click your profile picture in the upper-right corner to open a menu, then choose Your activity. On the resulting page, choose Download your information on the left side.

Either method will take you to Instagram’s download request page, where you can get a copy of everything you’ve posted on Instagram.

Instagram says this includes all “your photos, comments, profile information, and more.” This can take up to 14 days to send, but shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to an hour in most cases.

Your email address should already be in the field, so click Next to continue. On desktop, you can choose HTML or JSON for the format. You’ll need to then enter your password, and Instagram will start generating the data.

Soon, you’ll get an email with a link to everything you’ve ever shared on Instagram. It’s only valid for a few days, so download your data quickly before it expires. This is the best way to save an archived copy of your entire Instagram profile in a short amount of time.

How to Download Instagram Photos on iPhone

Instagram doesn’t provide an official way for you to download your own photos individually on iPhone, Android, or the web. You might be tempted to download an app that claims to do this for you, but you should stay away from most of these. Never enter your Instagram password into a third-party app, as doing so could lead to your account getting stolen.

However, some downloader apps are safe to use because they don’t require your credentials. One is iGram, which works on mobile and desktop. It has some ads, but they aren’t overly intrusive. If the service isn’t available, you’ll find others like it that perform the same task.

To use it, find the Instagram photo you want to download—whether it’s one of yours or someone else’s. Tap the three-dot button at the top-right of the post and choose Link to copy the URL to your clipboard.

Next, open iGram in Safari or another browser. Tap in the URL box and choose Paste to add the link to your photo. Then press Download. After a few moments, you’ll see the image appear below.

You can tap on the Download 1080px or other buttons to quickly download the file in a variety of sizes. If you prefer, long-press on the image and choose Save to Photos or Share > Save Image instead.

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For future reference, you can also toggle a setting in the Instagram app to save a local copy of everything you post. To enable this, tap the Profile icon in the bottom-right corner of Instagram, then open the three-line menu in the top-right. Choose Settings in the list that appears.

Choose Account > Original Photos from the list here. If you enable Save Original Photos, Instagram will save a copy of the unedited version of any photos you take with the Instagram camera. This is a good way to make sure you don’t lose anything, and saves you from doing the manual method above every time.

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How to Download Instagram Photos on Android

The process for downloading Instagram photos on Android is quite similar to the above process for iPhone. We’ll cover it again here with Android screenshots, due to a few minor differences.

Open Instagram and find the picture you want to save. Tap on the three-dot Menu button above the post and choose Copy Link to add it to your clipboard. Next, open Chrome or another browser and go to iGram.

Press and hold inside the text field to show the Paste option and tap that. Then hit Download and wait a few moments for the image to process. Scroll down and tap Download 1080px or one of the other buttons to immediately download it. If you prefer, you can also long-press on the image and choose Download image.

To find your downloaded image, tap the three-dot menu button at the top-right of Chrome and choose Downloads to view it. You can also use a file explorer app to navigate to the Downloads folder and check it there.

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You’ll find the same option on Android for saving a copy of all future Instagram posts, too. In the Instagram app, tap your Profile icon in the bottom-right of the app, then open the three-line menu at the top-right and choose Settings from the resulting window. On the next menu, choose Account > Original Posts.

Enable the options here to save copies of everything you post to your phone’s storage. In addition to saving unedited photos, Instagram on Android lets you also choose to save the posted images and videos you put on your account.

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How to Download Instagram Photos on a PC

iGram (and similar services) will work fine on your desktop or laptop too. To use it on a desktop browser, just click the three-dot menu button on an Instagram post and choose Copy link. Paste the link into iGram to access a downloadable copy of the image, just like on mobile.

If you’d like to take a more technical route, you can use a trick to access and download Instagram images through the page’s source code. To do this, first click a photo’s timestamp near the bottom of the page (such as 2 Days Ago) to open its permanent URL. Once on that page, right-click the image and choose View page source.

In a new tab, you’ll see a bunch of HTML code, but don’t worry if you’re not familiar with this. Press Ctrl + F to search, and enter og:image to jump to the only line that contains this text. On that line, find the URL that appears after content=. It will usually have .jpg somewhere in it; you’ll need to copy the entire URL for it to work.

Copy this URL and open it in a new tab to load just the image. Then you can right-click and choose Save image as to download a copy.

How to Quickly Download Many Instagram Photos From a Profile

If you want to download many photos from one account, it’s pretty slow to use the above methods for each image. There are other Instagram downloader websites that let you quickly download many images from a profile.

They’re not perfect—most of them don’t let you download more than a handful of images in one session, or charge you to download everything from an account. But if you want to download a few recent posts from an account, it’s faster to use a service like Toolzu.

This offers a Download profile option that loads all recent images from a user and lets you click Download to grab their photos in quick succession. Give it a try if you find the above too slow. You can download more photos at once if you sign up for an account.

Don’t Forget About Bookmarking Images on Instagram

While it’s not the same as downloading, you can also hit the Bookmark icon on a post to save it for later. You can access all your saved Instagram bookmarks by tapping on the three-line menu on your profile page and choosing Saved.

Bookmarking on Instagram allows you to jump back to a photo without copying the link or downloading it. These are only visible to you; nobody else can see your saved posts on Instagram.

Keep in mind that bookmarks are only shortcuts to existing posts on Instagram. If the owner takes down a photo you’ve saved, the bookmark won’t work anymore.

Unfortunately, there is no way to download all your saved photos on Instagram at once. Some third-party software exists for this, but as mentioned, you should be careful about trusting these apps since they can compromise your Instagram account.

In addition to the default Saved list, you can create and manage additional Collections on this page. These are handy for collecting posts around a certain theme, such as ideas for a wedding.

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When you tap the Bookmark icon on an Instagram post, you can then choose Save to Collection to put it somewhere else. Tap a collection from the list that appears, or hit the Plus icon to make a new one.

Saving and Downloading Instagram Photos Made Easy

We’ve covered how to download everything you’ve posted to Instagram, how to save a copy of other people’s photos, and even how to grab an image from the source code on desktop. These methods should allow you to download pretty much any photo on Instagram.

There are lots of other ways to become an Instagram pro beyond just saving photos, though.