how to download all your instagram photos, and keep them in order.

for a lot of people, instagram quietly became a photo album. the first apartment, a long trip, a dog who's no longer around. the originals were on a phone that's long gone, and the copy on instagram is the one that survived. that's fine while the account is there. it's less fine if you lose access to it, close it, or the app changes how things work.

instagram has a built-in way to export everything you've shared. it takes a few minutes to set up and some patience while it gets ready. the steps below follow instagram's own help pages. menu names shift now and then, and meta is moving people over to new account settings, so if a label looks a little different on your phone, look for the closest match.

step 1: check your space and your email

before you start, two small things make the rest easier.

• space. an export of many years of photos and videos can be large, especially at high quality. it's easiest to download on a computer with room to spare, or onto an external drive.
• email. instagram sends a notice when the export is ready. make sure the email address on your account is one you still read.

if you have more than one account, a personal one and an old one from years ago, do each of them. every account is exported on its own.

step 2: open the export tool

the export lives in accounts center, the settings area meta shares across instagram and facebook. in the instagram app:

1. go to your profile and open the menu (the three lines in the top corner).
2. tap accounts center. on some accounts this is now called meta account.
3. tap your information and permissions.
4. tap export your information, then create export.
5. choose the instagram profile you want, then tap next.
6. choose export to device.

on a computer, the same tool is under more, then settings, at the bottom left of instagram's website. if you've already done this for facebook, it'll look familiar: downloading all your photos from facebook uses the same screens.

step 3: pick the right settings

this is the step that matters most. before you start the export, instagram lets you choose a few things:

• what to include. you can export everything, or only some kinds of information. if you only want photos and videos, choose just the parts that hold your posts, stories and reels. it makes the file smaller. if you're not sure, take everything. you can ignore what you don't need later.
• date range. choose all time. a shorter range is handy for a top-up later, but the first export should cover the whole account.
• format. instagram offers html or json. html opens in a web browser and is easy to look through. json is meant for other tools to read. for most people, html is the right choice.
• media quality. choose high. the file is bigger, but this is the copy you're keeping.

when it all looks right, tap start export.

step 4: wait, then download within 4 days

instagram prepares the export in the background. for a small account it can be quick. instagram's help pages say it can take up to 30 days. you'll get an email and a notification in the app when it's ready.

once it's ready, you have 4 days to download it from the available downloads section of the same export tool. after that, it's gone and you'd need to start again. so when the email arrives, set aside a few minutes that day. instagram asks for your password before the download, since the file holds your private information.

a large account may come in more than one file. download every part, and keep them together in one folder.

step 5: open it and find your photos

the download is a zip file. unzip it on your computer and you'll find a set of folders. you'll usually find the photos and videos themselves in a folder called media, with posts, stories and reels kept apart. the html pages next to them show each post with its caption and the date it went up.

keep the whole unzipped folder as it is, even the parts that look like clutter. the pages and data files are where the dates and captions live. they're small, and you may be glad of them later.

a note on things you've deleted: instagram's help pages say that deleted information won't appear in the export. if you archived a post rather than deleting it, it's still yours and should come along. if you deleted it, it's gone from instagram's side.

step 6: keep track of when each photo happened

here's the part that catches people out. instagram stores a smaller, compressed copy of each photo, and most of the hidden details from the camera, including the date it was taken, are usually gone. once downloaded, many files look like they were made the day you exported them. open a few years of posts in a photo app and they can all pile up on one day.

a few habits help:

• use the post date as a guide. the html pages in the export show when each post went up. for most posts that's close to when the photo was taken, and it's a lot better than the download date.
• remember the late posts. a throwback from a summer years ago may have been posted much later. those are worth fixing by hand.
• fix the dates in batches. fixing wrong dates on photos walks through how on iphone, mac, google photos and windows.

and if the original of a photo still exists on an old phone, a hard drive or a cloud account, that copy is better: full quality, usually with its real date inside. keep the instagram copy as a backup, and the original as the one you treasure.

step 7: back it up

an export sitting in a downloads folder is one copy on one computer. put it in at least two more places, like a separate drive and a cloud account. the 3-2-1 habit for family videos works the same way here. as you bring photos in from more places, you'll find some of them twice. finding and deleting duplicate photos covers how to keep the best copy.

a few things that save time

• do it before you need it. exporting is easy while you can still log in. if you ever lose access to an account, getting your photos back gets much harder.
• look for old accounts. a teenage account, a travel account, one you made for the dog. they each hold a slice of a life.
• check the messages, too. photos people sent you in direct messages are part of the full export. it's worth a look if a friend shared pictures that way.
• repeat once a year. a short date range picks up only what's new since last time.

where treasure box fits

treasure box is the private life archive we're building to hold a whole life in one place, ordered by when things happened. the first version starts with photos and videos, laid out on one private timeline by the date each one was taken. that's why the date step matters: an instagram post from a long trip, with the right year, can sit beside the photos from that same trip that lived on your old phone, instead of landing on the day you exported it.

the exporting you do today is worth doing for any archive you use, now or later. once the files are on your computer, organizing old digital photos is a good next step, and saving whatsapp photos brings in another place family pictures tend to hide. if a private timeline sounds like the kind of home you'd want for them, see how treasure box works or read our privacy promises.

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