You've spent years curating your Instagram saved posts. Recipes you meant to cook. Travel destinations for retirement. Inspiration boards, workout routines, art references, memes to revisit. Maybe you organized them into collections — "Recipes," "Travel," "Inspo" — thinking they'd always be there.
They might not be. Your saved posts live on Instagram's servers, not yours. You don't own a copy. You have access — for now. And access can disappear:
- Accounts go private or get deleted. The creator who posted that recipe sets their account to private, or deletes it entirely. The post vanishes from your saves — no warning, no notification.
- Posts get removed. Instagram's moderation systems flag a post, or a creator removes it themselves. It disappears from your saved list retroactively.
- Your account gets compromised. A hacked password, a phishing email you didn't catch — and your account is locked. Everything in it, including your saves, is inaccessible.
- You decide to leave. If you're deactivating or deleting your Instagram account, your saved posts go with it. There's no "export my saves" button in the settings menu.
Instagram gives you no native way to download the photos and videos you've saved. The "Saved" tab shows you what you've bookmarked, but there's no "Download All" button. No "Export Saved Posts" option. No way to bulk-save your collections to your hard drive.
This guide walks you through backing up that collection to a folder on your own computer, in two parts: requesting your official Instagram data export, then turning that export into a real archive with UnplugMe.
What Instagram actually gives you
Instagram's Download Your Information feature is the official, supported way to get a copy of your account data. It is built into the product, it is user-initiated, and it is exactly what it sounds like.
What lands in your inbox a few hours later is a ZIP file. Inside it is JSON — structured text describing your account:
- Every post you have saved, and the collection each one belongs to
- Every post you have liked
- Every reel, story, and post you published yourself
- Your followers and following lists
- Your messages, comments, and search history
Here is roughly what a saved post looks like inside that file:
{
"title": "recipes",
"string_map_data": {
"Saved on": {
"href": "https://www.instagram.com/p/CxAmPlEp0sT/",
"timestamp": 1719763200
}
}
}Notice what is not there: the photo. The export contains a href — a link that points at the post. The media itself still lives on Instagram's servers.
Your data export is a list, not an album. It tells you what you saved and when. It does not hand you the pictures.
That gap is the whole problem. A link to a post you saved in 2019 is worth very little if the post is gone, and links in the export eventually stop resolving.
Part 1: Request your data export
This part happens entirely on Instagram. Nothing else is involved.
- Open instagram.com in your browser and sign in to the account you want to back up.
- Open Settings, then Accounts Center at the top of the panel.
- Go to Your information and permissions, then Download your information.
- Choose Download or transfer information, then pick the Instagram account you are archiving.
- Select All available information — or tick just Likes, Saved, and Your posts if you want a smaller file.
- Choose Download to device.
- Set the format to JSON, the date range to All time, and media quality to High.
- Click Create files and wait for the email.
The one setting people get wrong
Format must be JSON, not HTML. The HTML option produces a browsable web page that is pleasant to click through and useless to any tool that needs to read it back. If you pick HTML, you will have to request the whole thing again.
Instagram usually emails you within a few hours. Large accounts can take up to 48 hours, and very large accounts sometimes arrive split across several numbered ZIP files. All of the parts are valid — keep them together.
For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see our Instagram data export guide.
Part 2: Turn the export into an actual archive
Once the ZIP arrives, UnplugMe reads it in your browser and resolves each of those links back into the photo or video it points at, then downloads them to your hard drive.
- Install UnplugMe from the Chrome Web Store. No account, no signup — just click "Add to Chrome."
- Open Instagram in your browser and sign into the account whose data you're archiving. UnplugMe uses this session to download the media files — the same session your browser uses to display posts.
- Click the UnplugMe extension icon in your browser toolbar. Drag and drop the ZIP file (or files) from Instagram into the extension window. UnplugMe parses it locally — the file never gets uploaded to any server.
- Review the summary. In about a second, you'll see how many saved posts, liked posts, and collections were found, and how many media items are ready to download.
- Click download. UnplugMe fetches each photo and video from Instagram's servers using your authenticated session, writing them to your hard drive. Photos save as JPGs at the highest available resolution. Videos and Reels save as MP4s. Carousel posts capture every slide.
- Check your Downloads folder. You'll find a folder called UnplugMe, organized by platform and then by collection. Your saved posts are sorted into subfolders matching the collection names you created in Instagram.
A few things worth knowing about how this works:
- The ZIP never leaves your computer. It is parsed locally, in the browser tab. There is no upload step, because there is no server to upload it to.
- It runs in your own session. You are signed in to your own account, downloading posts you already had access to. UnplugMe does not reach for anything you could not open yourself by clicking the bookmark icon.
- Your first 50 downloads are free. No account, no card. Enough to see whether it does what you want before you pay anything.
- The output is folders, not a database. Your collections become directories. Your saves, likes, and favorites stay separate.
How your collections become real folders
This is the part that surprises people most.
When you save a post on Instagram, you can file it into a collection — "Recipes," "Travel Ideas," "Workout Motivation." These collections only exist inside Instagram's app. There's no way to export them as a folder structure.
UnplugMe does. When it reads your export, it sees the collection name attached to each saved post. It uses that name to create a real folder on your hard drive, then places every post from that collection inside it.
So if you had three Instagram collections — "Recipes" with 200 posts, "Travel" with 500 posts, and "Inspo" with 1,000 posts — your UnplugMe download folder looks like this:
Downloads/
UnplugMe/
Instagram/
Saved/
Recipes/
[200 photos and videos]
Travel/
[500 photos and videos]
Inspo/
[1,000 photos and videos]
Likes/
[all your liked posts, mixed]Your liked posts go into their own folder, since likes aren't organized into collections. Everything is browsable in your file manager — no app, no viewer, no internet needed.
Why the export approach beats scrolling
Most other Instagram downloader extensions work by scrolling through your saved posts page and downloading each one individually. Instagram throttles scrolling after a few hundred posts, there's no way to resume if your connection drops, and competitors hit a wall well before you reach the end of a large save library.
UnplugMe reads the official data export instead — which contains your entire save history regardless of length. There's no scrolling, no throttling, no ceiling. The export has every saved post you've ever bookmarked, going back to the day you created your account.
What you will and will not get back
Be realistic about the ceiling here. Posts deleted by their original creator are gone — no tool can recover them. Accounts that have since gone private will not resolve. Some older media links have already expired on Instagram's side.
In practice most of a saved collection comes back intact, and the pieces that do not are almost always ones that vanished years ago without you noticing. That is precisely the argument for doing this sooner rather than later.
A note on what you are keeping
The posts in your saved folder were mostly made by other people. Backing them up for your own reference is a personal archive, the same as a bookmarks file or a scrapbook — but the content still belongs to the creators who made it. Keep it for yourself; do not republish it as your own.
What is unambiguously yours is your own account data: your posts, your likes, your collections, the record of what you found worth keeping. That is the part no platform should be the only custodian of.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I download all my Instagram saved posts at once?
Not through Instagram directly — there's no "Download All" button on the Saved page. But you can by combining Instagram's official data export (which lists every saved post) with UnplugMe (which fetches the actual media files using your logged-in browser session).
Does Instagram let you download your saved posts?
Instagram lets you download a data export that includes metadata about your saved posts — the URLs, timestamps, and collection names. But the export contains JSON files with links, not the actual photos and videos. To get the media files themselves, you need a tool like UnplugMe that resolves those links into downloaded files.
How do I backup my Instagram collections?
Request your Instagram data export (format: JSON, date range: All time), then drop the ZIP into UnplugMe. The extension reads the collection names from the export and creates matching folders on your hard drive — so your "Recipes" collection becomes a "Recipes" folder, your "Travel" collection becomes a "Travel" folder, and so on.
Is there a way to download all liked Instagram posts?
Yes. Your liked posts are included in Instagram's data export under the "Likes" category. When you drop the export into UnplugMe, it reads every liked post and downloads the associated media — photos as JPGs, videos as MP4s — into a Likes folder on your hard drive.
How long does Instagram's data export take?
Instagram typically processes exports within a few hours, but for large accounts it can take up to 48 hours. You'll receive an email notification when it's ready, and you'll need to re-enter your password to download the ZIP file.
Will using UnplugMe affect my Instagram account?
UnplugMe works from the official data export and your own signed-in browser session — the same access you already have. We can't make guarantees about platform enforcement decisions, but archiving your own exported data is exactly what these export tools are designed for.
Does UnplugMe store my data on its servers?
No. UnplugMe runs entirely as a Chrome extension in your browser. Your data export is parsed locally, media files transfer directly from Instagram's servers to your computer, and nothing is ever uploaded to or stored on UnplugMe's servers.
Start your archive — your first 50 downloads are free
You don't need to commit to anything to try this. Your first 50 downloads through UnplugMe are completely free — no credit card, no signup, no account. Install the extension, drop in your Instagram export, and see exactly what you've been saving.
If it works — if you see your collections become real folders and your saved photos appear on your hard drive — upgrading to unlimited downloads is a one-time $23 payment. No subscription, no recurring billing. One purchase, all platforms, all future updates included.
Install UnplugMe for Chrome — Free →
Your saved posts have been living on someone else's hard drive for years. It's time to put them on yours.