Thursday, February 27, 2014

Live & Learn Thursday :: How to Download Photos From Your Instagram Account

You all know what time it is! Time for another Live & Learn Thursday link up! This week I will be sharing a recent ah-ha moment with you.
 
Life As Always
 
So I had these really good intentions of doing a #100happydays update at day 25, but that didn't happen. Nope, it wasn't until day 37 that I got my act together and managed to get that posted. It wasn't like the post itself was difficult, it was just a bunch of photos that I had already formatted and posted to my Instagram page. I just had to collect them from thier various folders on my phone and transfer them to my computer.

So what took me so long? Well, you see I'm stubborn. I was convinced there was a way to download the images from my Instagram account on to my computer, saving me time and the frustration of tracking down each photo seperately. It took me a while but I finally figured it out, and that my friends, was my major ah-ha moment from last week. I may or may not have done most definitely did a few Tiger Woods fist pumps of victory!
 
So today I bring to you, the complete instructions for how to download photos from your Instagram account.
 
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1. Download Google Chrome. Yep, you just gotta do it, if you haven't already. I think Mozilla might work but Explorer does not work. Trust me on this. You can download Google Chrome here.

 
2. Log into your Instagram account. Be sure to use your freshly downloaded Google Chrome web browser to do this. Then click on over to your profile page.




3. Select the image you want to download. Click on the image, so it appears in the center of your screen. Then right-click on the image to get the following menu to appear. From this menu, click on "Inspect element".




4. Next, find the html link to your image. At the bottom of your screen a box with a bunch of html code will appear. Look through the text for the link to your image. It should start with something like src="http:// ...  ....jpg". When you click on it, a small thumbnail of your image should appear.


Here is a closer look at where to find the html code for the image.
 


 
5. Open the image link in a New Tab. Once you have found the html link for the photo, right click on the photo to open a new menu. From this menu select the option for "Open link in new tab".
 

 
 
6. Download the Image to your computer. Once the image has opened in a new tab, you can right-click the image again to open another menu. From this menu select the option for "Save image as...". After a quick prompt for where and under what name you want the image saved, you will have successfully downloaded your image.
 
 
There you have it. How to download images from Instagram in six easy steps!
 
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I know there are programs out there that will do all this for you automatically, but here is my warning: I downloaded one of them and it installed a bunch of random other stuff on my computer and that is not cool. Joel wasn't very happy with me and he did some magic trick on my computer to fix things. So very annoying. Downloading pictures from Instagram this way, might take a bit longer, but it is safe.

I know it probably isn't something you will use frequently, because who really needs to download their own images from Instagram, but if you ever find yourself trying to put together an update post for your recent photo-a-day challenge or some other strange activity, you will be equipped with the tools you need to make it easy.

Be sure to stop by the link up and see what other lessons are being shared today!

 XOJO


3 comments:

  1. What a great tip. I've always wondered how to do this.

    :)

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  2. Am I not following you or what?? It's been a long day so I can't check-- this looks really complicated after a bottle of wine and a long day!!!

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  3. I haven't had a reason to do this, but now that I see how complicated it is I'm glad you figured it out for me in case I ever need to! I admire your perseverance in figuring it out... I would have given up for sure!

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