Instagram Saver

Instagram Saver is a Chrome extension for downloading media from Instagram pages you can already view in your browser session. It supports posts, reels, stories, highlights, and profile-page batches, and it prefers Instagram's own API-visible media instead of scraping the page UI.

What It Does

• Downloads media from the current Instagram post, reel, story, or highlight page
• Supports profile-page batch downloads and full-profile crawls that keep running automatically until the profile ends or Instagram rate limits the session
• Uses your logged-in Instagram session, so private or restricted content still follows normal Instagram access rules
• Can export optional JSON metadata and batch reports alongside downloads
• Lets you customize folders, filenames, duplicate handling, full-crawl pacing, and download prompts

Installation

1. Open chrome://extensions/ in Chrome or another Chromium-based browser.
2. Enable Developer mode.
3. Click Load unpacked.
4. Select this repository folder.

Usage

1. Open an Instagram page for a post, reel, story, highlight, or profile.
2. Click the extension icon to open the popup.
3. Start the download from the popup, or use the Instagram page context menu for a direct download.

On profile pages, the popup can also start or resume a larger crawl. The extension keeps moving through saved 48-post checkpoints automatically, spaces out full-crawl requests according to the selected crawl pace, and only relies on the stored cursor when a crawl is interrupted, cancelled, or rate limited.

Settings

The options page includes:

• Light, dark, or themed UI modes
• Easy-click download mode
• Confirmation before download
• Metadata sidecar export
• Batch report export
• Duplicate handling controls
• Profile media filters, per-profile post limits, and full-crawl pace
• Folder, media filename, and metadata filename templates
• Download history export and reset

Available template tokens are {username}, {id}, {kind}, {type}, {index}, and {date}.

Metadata

When metadata export is enabled, the extension writes a JSON sidecar file with available details such as username, identifiers, caption text, timestamps, media URLs, dimensions, and output filenames. If batch report export is enabled, it also writes a report covering skipped files, failures, and profile pagination diagnostics.

Within a single batch, planned filenames are made collision-safe automatically. If the same path already exists from an earlier run, Chrome still decides the final on-disk rename behavior.

Permissions

• contextMenus to add a page-level download action
• downloads to queue downloads
• scripting to inject the content script when needed
• storage to persist settings and crawl checkpoints
• tabs to read the active tab for popup state and availability badges
• Host access is limited to instagram.com and its subdomains.
• The toolbar action is disabled on non-Instagram pages.

Limitations

• The extension does not bypass Instagram login, privacy, or follow restrictions.
• It does not assemble DASH or HLS streams or do ffmpeg-style muxing.
• Profile downloads and full crawls are best-effort and depend on Instagram's current APIs, cursors, and rate limits.
• It does not crawl hashtags in the background.

Development

1. Update the source files.
2. Reload the unpacked extension in chrome://extensions.
3. Test against real Instagram pages while logged in.