save your instagram pictures

3 Ways to Back Up Your Instagram Account

If you’ve been using Instagram for a few years, you probably have posted hundreds of photos and maybe dozens of videos online.

Perhaps you have a few hundred followers: family members, friends, or other people who have similar interests. You’ve had lots of conversations in the comments about places you’ve visited, food you’ve eaten, or concerts you’ve attended.

And if you care about the photos on your Instagram account, you’ll want to back them up, right?

Remember, you don’t own the content you post on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

So you check your Instagram settings, thinking there’ll be an option to backup your content.

Huh? And then you realize it.

Instagram has no built-in utility to backup your photos.

Third-Party Backup Solutions for Instagram

I’ve never understood why Instagram doesn’t have an option to export your content. Thankfully, others have stepped forward to develop solutions for Instagram backups.

From online web services, to automated systems, to WordPress plugins, you have several options for backing up your Instagram content.

It doesn’t matter what backup solution you use, you want to make sure you back up your Instagram photos.

Here are three free ways to back up the content in your Instagram account

1. Instaport:

For a quick, easy way to get a backup of your Instagram account, use the free, onlineInstaport service. You can download the contents of your Instagram account to a zipfile and save it to your local storage.

Follow these steps to download your backup:

1. Visit Instaport
2. Log in with your Instagram account
3. Select the option to export all your photos, the last 10 photos you’ve taken, photos within a certain time period, or photos you’ve tagged with a specific hashtag
4. A new beta feature offers the option to back up your videos

Once the backup is complete, select the “Donate & Download” or the “Download only” link to download your Instagram content in a zipfile.

Depending on the number of photos and videos you’ve posted on Instagram (and the export options you’ve chosen), it can take several minutes for the export to complete. A recent backup of over 1250 photos on my Instagram account took three minutes to complete
2.IFTTT

 The IFTTT (short for If This, Then That) online service offers several recipes to back up your Instagram account to online storage.

If you’re not familiar with IFTTT, it’s an online service that connects your favorite applications together.

You create simple conditional statements to create “recipes” that run automatically in the background, based on a simple statement: if this happens, do that.

IFTTT has recipes for backing up Instagram content to multiple online services, including:

Google Drive (I’ve used this recipe)
OneDrive
Dropbox
and more.

A couple items to be aware of: the IFTTT recipes will only back up new photos, not old ones. Depending on the recipe you use, backups may occur instantly. If you’e not on a wifi network, you can occur additional charges on your data plan.

3.DsgnWorks Instagram Importer WordPress Plugin

If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, you can backup and show your Instagram photos with the free DsgnWorks Instagram Importer plugin.

I haven’t yet tried this option for backup, but the online reviews in the WordPress repository are good (4.2 out of 5 stars).

The plugin offers multiple features, including many customization options:

Control the content of the title, with tags for location and captions
Videos are automatically imported into Media Library, along with their cover photos
Built-in support for WordPress custom post types
Developed by Justin Sternberg, there’s also a debug plugin in case you run into errors.
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