How to save all your old Instagram stories and posts
Before deleting from a social network, don't forget to do the following.
We post a lot of things about our lives on Instagram – special occasions, special people, maybe a few quirky memes. But in between all those posts, there’s not much time to think about what happens to those photos and videos. What if you decide to leave Instagram? What if you want to relive those memories on another app? How do you save all your old Instagram stories and posts?
In fact, Instagram does a great job of preserving your photos and videos. Even those that are in your story and disappear from view after 24 hours. Whether you want to save all the pictures for posterity or you need to revisit one specific memory, you have options. MigNews will tell you about them.
How to save all your new Instagram posts to your phone
The easiest way to make sure everything you post on Instagram is saved forever is to save your posts to your phone's gallery. From there, save them and store them in the cloud using Google Photos, Apple Photos, or whatever photo storage service you use.
You can set Instagram to save your posts as you publish them, Source: Instagram
There are settings in the Instagram app to control this. Tap your profile picture (bottom right), then tap the menu button (top right): Select “Archive and Download,” then turn on all four toggles. This means that both posts and stories will be saved to your phone’s library, while stories and live streams will be permanently saved to your Instagram archive.
As for stories and reels, you can also save them to your phone manually. To save a story, tap the three dots (top right) and then “Save.” For reels, right before posting, you can scroll through the icons at the bottom of the screen to find the download option (down arrow): Tap it to save the reel.
That's all there is to saving Instagram content to your phone, and now you can move it anywhere you want. If you haven't enabled these features yet or forgot to save something, there are still ways to extract images and clips from Instagram.
Saving existing Instagram posts
On the web version, you can view everything you've posted to your Instagram profile by clicking Profile on the web: keep scrolling to find older posts, and click on any of them to open a larger version. Click “View Archive” at the top, and you'll be able to see past stories, even if they've disappeared from your friends' view (and provided you've enabled the archive option we talked about above).
Old stories can be saved via a mobile app. Source: popsci.com
To save a photo online, click on it and then add “/media?size=l” to the URL in your browser's address bar. This will give you a full-size version of the image, which you can save to your computer by right-clicking. For bulk downloads, you can use Esuit Photos Downloader for Instagram, a reliable extension for Chrome and Edge browsers. However, there is no reliable way to download stories from the Internet.
On mobile, it's the other way around. There's no easy way to save old posts from your profile page other than taking a screenshot and then cropping it, but you can save your stories. On your profile page, tap the menu button (top right), then Archive: Tap a story to view it, then tap the three dots in the bottom right corner and select “Save photo.” This depends on whether you've enabled Story archiving (see above).
You can also save Reels on your mobile phone – in the “Reels” tab on your profile (the clapperboard icon): Tap on the Reels to open it, then tap on the share button (the paper airplane), then scroll to the right and select “Download.” Both options – Stories and Reels – work separately. You download these posts as you create them.
You can also download all your data from Instagram, Source: Instagram
There is another way to do this.
Export all of your Instagram account data. On the mobile app, tap your profile icon (bottom right), then the menu button (top right), then Account Center > Your Info & Permissions > Download Your Info > Download or Transfer Info, and select your account. Make sure the date range is set to “All Time” and the media quality is set to “High.” On the web, you can find this same option under More > Settings.
Once Instagram has collected all of your data, a download link will be sent to your registered email address, giving you access to your full collection of Instagram photos and videos (and other data). You can save these files and back them up to any location you like.
Do you love watching Instagram reels? Find out if the social network will really create a separate app for them.