I'd been meaning to do this for over a year and it took the internet nearly setting itself on fire this week to actually get me to click the button.
Quick recap if you somehow missed it: on Monday Instagram quietly pushed out a new terms of service, set to take effect January 16th, and buried in there was language that made it sound like they could take your photos and stick them in ads without paying you or even telling you. People lost it. Not "annoyed forum post" lost it, more like "National Geographic says they might stop posting" lost it. #boycottinstagram was everywhere by Tuesday morning, and a bunch of my friends posted their obligatory "deleting my account, follow me on [redacted alternative app nobody actually used]" statuses.
By Tuesday evening Kevin Systrom had a blog post up basically saying oops, that wording was bad, we werent planning to sell your carefully filtered brunch photos to Pepsi. Which, fine, I believe him actually. I dont think Instagram's business plan hinges on my 640x640 photo of a burrito showing up in a banner ad somewhere. But "trust us, we worded it badly" is not exactly a great look for a company that two seconds ago got bought by Facebook, a company whose entire personality is "we will use your data in ways you didnt expect."
Anyway. Whether or not anything shady was actually planned, the whole thing was a good kick in the pants to finally back up three years of photos that only exist on somebody else's servers.
What I actually used
There's a site called Instaport (instaport.me) that's been around a while for exactly this. You log in with your Instagram account, give it permission, and it pulls every photo you've ever posted into either a zip file, a Flickr album, or a Dropbox folder. I went with the zip option because I already have a Flickr account I never use and didnt need a second one.
A few notes if youre doing this too:
- It choked the first time I tried, Tuesday night, probably because half of Instagram's userbase had the same idea at the same moment. Got a timeout error twice before it actually started pulling photos.
- It preserves the images but not captions, likes, or comments, which I didnt realize until after. If you actually care about the comment threads on your old posts (I mostly dont, except one where my sister roasted me pretty good over a haircut photo from 2011), youll want to grab those manually before you export.
- I have something like 640 photos and the whole thing took close to twenty minutes once it actually got going.
- The zip file it hands you is just the raw images, numbered, no folder structure or dates attached. Not elegant. But it works, and elegant wasnt really the point.
The bigger complaint
Honestly the terms of service wording bugs me less than the fact that this is basically how it always goes now. You get a free service, you pour years of stuff into it, and every so often theres a scramble because a company changed some paragraph nobody reads and suddenly everyone's panicking about ownership of things they already gave away the second they hit "share." I'm not even that mad at Instagram specifically, Im mad at the general shape of the thing. Something similar happens every few months with some other app, and it'll happen again with whatever were all using two years from now.
Also, unrelated tangent, but if youre one of the people who spent this week angrily trying to jump ship to a "real" alternative to Instagram: most of them are ghost towns right now. I poked around a couple of them Tuesday out of curiosity and the upload button on one just didnt work. Not a great pitch, guys.
Point is, back up your stuff. Doesnt have to be because of a scandal, and it doesnt have to be Instaport specifically, theres a few other tools floating around that do roughly the same thing. Do it on a random Tuesday for no reason at all. I finally did it because of this mess, and now I have a slightly disorganized folder of 640 burritos, doorways, and one extremely embarrassing haircut sitting on my own hard drive, which is exactly where I want it.