Instagram Photo Downloader

About that barcode-looking filename

Pull a photo down, open your Downloads folder, and the filename is something like 483603789_17871380199302275_2048372915_n.webp. Ugly, yeah. Not your fault though — and not really ours, as it turns out.

Instagram's image CDN (scontent-*.cdninstagram.com) returns a 403 Forbidden on any request from a server when we try to set a Content-Disposition header — which is the mechanism that lets a site say "save this file as X.jpg". For video and audio we can do that trick on our backend; for photos, no. Instagram's CDN treats server-side photo requests as hotlinking and blocks the header.

The workaround we landed on: send you to the image directly via a 302 redirect. Your browser downloads straight from Instagram's CDN, which works fine, but your browser also has no instructions about what to name the file. So it uses the URL path. Which is the internal IG blob ID. Which looks like a barcode.

Rename after download. There's no cleaner way until Instagram relaxes that CDN rule, and they've been tightening it, not relaxing it.

WEBP isn't a downgrade

Most Instagram photos from 2022 onwards come down as .webp instead of .jpg. Which trips people up — "weird format, lower quality, right?" Not really.

WebP at Instagram's default quality looks visually identical to JPG at equivalent settings, but the file is maybe 25–35% smaller on disk. The catch? There isn't one, really. Every modern OS opens it natively — recent macOS, recent Windows (once the Photos app has updated), recent iOS, and any Android from the last decade handle it fine. MDN's reference for WebP at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Guides/Formats/Image_types#webp_image covers the browser support matrix if you want to verify. Preview, the Photos app, the Windows viewer — no complaints.

If your downstream software chokes on WebP (some old image editors, some social platforms' uploaders), convert with any image viewer: right-click → Export As → JPG. macOS Preview does it in two clicks. No quality loss you'll see unless you pixel-peep at 400%.

Multi-photo posts — one click per slide for now

A multi-photo post returns a numbered list. Photo 1 of N, Photo 2 of N, straight through. Every row gets its own Download button, every row runs independently, and every row inherits the same barcode-filename problem — they're photos, the CDN rules apply.

We show a 48×48 thumbnail next to each row so you can tell which is which without clicking through. Useful for big carousels where the slides blur together in memory.

A "Download all as ZIP" button is on the backlog. Not shipped yet because the zip-streaming server side has to sit alongside our existing ffmpeg workers without starving them. Engineering tradeoff, not a missing checkbox.

What "full resolution" actually means on Instagram

Instagram stores photos at a maximum of 1080 pixels on the long edge. That's the ceiling. Creator uploaded a 12-megapixel original? Doesn't matter — IG resamples down before it hits the CDN.

You'll see 1080×1080 back for square posts most of the time. Portrait posts come out as 1080×1350 (the 4:5 aspect ratio the feed prefers). Landscape is rarer — when it does happen, around 1080×566, and the grid tends to crop those anyway.

We fetch the largest variant the CDN exposes. No hidden bigger version unlocks with the right API call. Ceiling is ceiling. Creator wanting your own originals back? Those live in your phone's camera roll — Instagram doesn't keep them around.

Why some carousels return a partial result

You'll see it once in a while: paste a 10-photo carousel, get back seven rows. The other three errored with "not available".

Usually that's one or two slides served from a CDN node that happens to be flaky during your request. Refresh the page, paste the URL again, and all ten typically show up the second time.

Rarely, it's Instagram's side actually serving different slides from different CDN shards, where one shard is temporarily unhappy. We don't retry automatically because retry storms are what get our IP pool flagged. Manual retry, minimum 30 seconds apart, almost always works.