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The Instagram Archiver.

A small, no-frills tool that grabs every post off a public Instagram profile and dumps them into year-by-year folders on your machine. No login, no API key, no waiting. Built because I needed it. Released because someone else probably does too.
Version
v1.1
License
do whatever
Output
/YYYY/ folders
Status
Working
/ 01
What it is
[ Plain english ]

The Instagram Archiver is a script that downloads every public post from a given profile and sorts them by year.

You hand it a username. It quietly walks the public timeline, pulls down each post's media (images, video thumbnails, carousels), and writes them into a clean folder structure on disk — one folder per year, named exactly that: 2014, 2015, 2026, etc.

It doesn't need your password. It doesn't touch private accounts. It doesn't post or DM or follow anybody. It downloads, it sorts, it stops.

The whole point is to have a full, browsable backup of a public profile that lives on your own machine — not in the cloud, not behind a login, not at the mercy of someone deleting their account on a Sunday.

/ 02
How it works
[ Four steps ]
STEP 01
Point it at a profile
Give it a public Instagram username. That's the entire setup.
STEP 02
Walk the timeline
It paginates through every visible post and pulls the media URL + timestamp for each one.
STEP 03
Sort by year
Each post is bucketed into a folder named after the year it was posted. Clean, predictable, no surprises.
STEP 04
Download & save
Media is written straight to disk. Done. You now have a local backup of the entire profile.
/ 03
The receipts
[ Proof of work ]
~/instagram-archiver/output/
live output
Output folders, one per year, generated by the Instagram Archiver
// 13 year-folders · 2014 → 2026 · auto-sorted · no manual cleanup
/ 04 — Try it

Grab the zip.

Latest release. Drop-in. Works as intended. No telemetry, no nonsense.

Download instagram-archiver.zip ↓
v1.1 · ~hosted locally, no external links