Q. My photos posted on Instagram (along with my captions) function like a visual diary of my years. Is there a safe way to preserve them — off my phone, maybe even to transfer them to hard copy? I would be devastated if they disappeared because of hacking, changes in the program, my account ending, etc.
A. The horror of a hacked, crashed or deleted social media account can mean losing years of personal memories. But, as with data stored locally on your computer, backing it all up somewhere else can give you peace of mind. Even if you are not too worried about being hacked, you may want to save a copy of your account’s contents if you decide to quit the service, the company goes out of business or changes to its terms of service agreement are not to your liking.
If you want a simple way to download a backup of the pictures, friends, followers, tags and comments from your Instagram account, a social media backup service like digi.me can be a hassle-free solution. Digi.me has free software for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS systems that automatically backs up and syncs your posts from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and several other social media networks to your local drive. Once you install the software, you can back up and view four social media accounts and get a 30-day free trial of the Digi.me premium service, which provides search, PDF creation and other features starting at $7 a year.
Frostbox is another service that works with Instagram, among other social media sites. Frostbox creates an automatic daily backup of your account that is stored online. Prices start at $7 a month.
If you just want to grab a copy of your Instagram photos themselves, free download tools like InstaPort from Vibbi.com can be a simple solution. For nice-looking hard copy, you can also order professional-looking prints and books of your account’s photos through online services like Social Print Studio or Blurb.
If you have the time, patience and fortitude, you can create your own archive of your Instagram feed on your computer. Log into your account from a Windows or Mac browser, click on each photo so it opens in it own page with likes and comments also displayed and print it — or save each photo page as a PDF. You can even combine all the separate PDF pages into one master file using PDFsam for Windows or Preview on the Mac to create your own digital document of your Instagram account.