How to save Instagram photos and carousels
Instagram serves several sizes of each image. Here is how to compare them, keep the framing you want, and save a whole carousel at once.
Saving a whole carousel
Paste the post link into the Instagram photo downloader, or the Reels downloader on the home page. Both use the same results. Every carousel slide, photo or video, appears as its own card in the order the creator arranged it.
Download all fetches the first listed rendition of each item and packages the carousel into one ZIP archive, so you get a single download instead of up to twenty separate files.
The ZIP is built on your device; nothing is uploaded to an archive service. Chrome and Edge write it straight to a location you choose. Firefox and Safari build it in memory first, so a carousel full of long videos can take a while and needs free memory.
Reading the size options
Photos are labelled by their pixel dimensions, because that is the only honest
description. A portrait post might offer 1080x1350 and
720x900: the same picture at two sizes.
Instagram's CDN can produce many near-identical widths for different screens. Those are filtered out, so the list only shows sizes that visibly differ. Instagram resizes uploads, usually to 1080 pixels wide, so the largest option is the best public copy rather than the original file from the camera.
Watch for square crops
Some renditions are centre-cropped to a square by the CDN instead of showing the full frame. Those are marked square crop. Choosing one for a 4:5 portrait loses the top and bottom of the picture, so pick an uncropped size unless you specifically want the square.
Why a file says JPG when its link says HEIC
Meta can store photos under a .heic-style path while its CDN
delivers JPEG. Naming the file from the path would give you a "HEIC" that is
really a JPEG, which many editors refuse to open. The filename follows the
format that actually arrives, so what you save opens everywhere.
Profile pictures
Paste a bare profile link such as instagram.com/username to save
that account's profile picture. Instagram sometimes only exposes a resized
version publicly, and accounts using the default avatar have no image to save.
Video slides in a carousel
Clips inside a carousel get the same quality list as a Reel, plus their cover image. The Instagram video downloader explains the video labels.