Save Those Reels: How to Download Videos and Photos From Instagram

The great Facebook outage of 2021 was a DNS snafu that took down the social network along with other services owned by Meta, including WhatsApp and Instagram. As they went dark, so did your digital memories. That’s why it’s smart to occasionally back up your social accounts, even if they’re already in the cloud—such as all your Insta-pics.

But what about content posted by others? As on Facebook or YouTube, there are copyright and revenue-earning reasons not to grab someone else’s video. But we know you’ll only use our instructions on how to download photos and videos from Instagram for good. (For example, don’t repost someone else’s content on your own accounts as if it’s your own. That’s a bad move.)

Download Your Instagram Content

The steps to do this couldn’t be simpler. On the desktop, navigate to instagram.com(Opens in a new window), click your avatar icon at the upper right and select Settings > Privacy and Security. Click the link under Data Download that says Request Download.

In the mobile app, the steps are slightly different. Go to your Profile (the icon at the lower right), then click the 3-line menu at the upper right. Tap Your Activity > Download your information.

(Credit: PCMag)

You’ll see a Get a Copy of What You’ve Shared on Instagram page. On the desktop, you get two choices—either download it in an easy-to-navigate HTML format or get it as a JSON data file that you can import into other services. Pick one and click Next. You’ll then have to re-enter your Instagram password and click Request Download.

On the mobile app, you don’t get the choice. Just tap Request Download.

(Credit: PCMag)

Instagram promises to have a link to you within 14 days, as it might take that long if you have a lot of data saved to your account. In the past, I got mine in less than a minute; this most recent request took 5 minutes. You can see it here, with a warning that the link in the email will stop working after four days because “it may contain personal information.”

(Credit: PCMag)

To download on the desktop, enter your password (and if you have two-factor authentication on, the second authentication code), and you’ll again be taken to Instagram.com, where you can grab the compressed file (in ZIP format). I’m not the biggest Instagrammer by any means, and my file was 105MB, so expect a hefty amount of data if you’ve been uploading for years.

Once you extract the data, if you got the HTML version, just click the index.html file to get started navigating it all. It’ll include comments, contacts, account info, and a lot more. For the important stuff, scroll down the page to Content to find Posts, Profile Photos, and Stories. (Yes, all those “ephemeral” Stories you posted that disappeared to others after 24 hours are there.) If you want the actual video and image files, look for the Media folder.

Download Other People’s Instagram Reels, Videos, Pics

Saving images and videos from Instagram isn’t easy. You can’t just long-press a finger on a posted pic in the app for a save option, nor even right-click to save on one in the desktop browser. That goes double for video. The easier way to get a third party’s Instagram content saved to your device is with a third-party tool.

For some of these to work, you need a specific link from Instagram for a photo or video. Getting that isn’t always easy. While on a desktop, you can usually right-click to Copy Link Address, but it doesn’t always work in all areas. In Stories, for example, even with a desktop browser you’ll have to pause the video and copy the URL in the address bar; on mobile, as a Story video plays, you can click the 3-dot menu and select Copy Link.

4K Stogram

$10 per year, $15 for lifetime, $45 for lifetime with unlimited subscriptions; Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu Linux

Desktop users should try 4K Stogram(Opens in a new window). It comes from the same developer as 4K Video Downloader, our top pick for grabbing video from YouTube. To use it, you have to sign into your Instagram account with the software, as “authorization is required to receive data from Instagram.” Click the download button to specify the source account you want to grab from, and the type of content you want. The backup button lets you grab all your own media, skipping the official steps above.

(Credit: PCMag)

Note that with the free version of 4K Stogram you’re limited to downloading photo and video posts, you can’t get Stories, Highlights, or anything tagged. The license also ensures you don’t see any ads and downloads are unlimited, in that you can literally subscribe and grab anything from any number of Instagram accounts. (4K Video Downloader(Opens in a new window) can handle most of the chores, too, but it seems to choke on Instagram Reels, the Instagram version of a TikTok clip.)

Free Instagram Downloader

Free (donation-ware); Windows

Free Instagram Downloader(Opens in a new window) is available at theFreeGrabApp site or from the Windows Store, so it comes directly from Microsoft (in the form of FlixGrabMS(Opens in a new window)). This app lets you grab any photo or video you have the URL for. Paste it into the app and set the download quality you want. The video above spells out the steps. (You can also get the full FlixGrab app(Opens in a new window), which downloads from Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and even streaming services.)

Toolzu

Free; Web-based

One of the most versatile ways to grab something from Instagram is the ad-supported website Toolzu(Opens in a new window). It will let you download a person’s profile pic, videos, photos, even vids in Stories or Instagram Video. It won’t do Reels. All you need is the exact URL to get a specific photo or video.

If you use the Profile downloader on Toolzu, you only need to enter the person’s Instagram user name, and it brings up the last 12 posts for easy downloading as a JPG for stills or an MP4 for videos. For anything older than those 12 posts, you need the URL. Toolzu works like a charm on mobile, too.

Downloader Websites

There are plenty of other websites that can help you grab an Insta pic or video (and sometimes Reels and Stories) if you have the URL. Some we tested that seem to work fine include iGram(Opens in a new window), Snapinsta(Opens in a new window), SSS Instagram(Opens in a new window), and Inflact(Opens in a new window); just be prepared to be bombarded with ads and ad-traps (they’ll try to trick you into clicking words like “start download” in ads). The nice thing is, because these are all browser-based, they should also work on your mobile device.

Mobile Apps

What about app for your mobile device? There are some. Many gravitate toward taking other people’s content and simply reposting it to your own Instagram, sans any watermarks or attribution to the original content creator, which as we said up top, is a move no one should make. Avoid apps that have titles like Reposter or Repost for Instagram.

Other apps seem to come and go quickly, probably after Meta (the parent company of Instagram and Facebook) files complaints about them. “FastSave” and “Repost O” were a couple we saw recommended, but they no longer shows up in the Apple App Store, for example.

There’s no lack of apps that pop up when you search Google Play or the App Store for “Instagram download” and they all look much the same. It’s hard to really recommend any of them, but going by the in-store recommended reviews, the top rated app as of this writing appears to be Video Downloader for Instagram(Opens in a new window) (free for Android) from ETM with a 4.9 star rating across almost 10.5K reviews. There doesn’t appear to be anything like that in the App Store for iOS users, not that doesn’t lean heavily on the “repost” paradigm.

You’ve now got the tools and info you need to put almost all of Instagram on your own hard drive. Use your powers only for good. Remember, there’s a reason Instagram posts are generally easy to share via embedding without any downloads, because it takes away from no one.