Don’t leave your precious media trapped inside app silos.
You’ve probably got a ton of photos and videos in your social media and messaging apps at this point—pictures of sunsets posted to Instagram, pictures of the kids posted to family WhatsApp groups, and so on—but you might not necessarily have those pictures and videos saved anywhere else.
That can be a problem, should something happen to the originals—say you’re thinking about abandoning a social media platform, for instance. It’s never a good idea to only have your most important files in one place, so we’d recommend making sure your social media and messaging photos and videos are exported and backed up. This counts for photos and videos other people send you too, as well as those you post yourself.
We can’t cover every single social media and messaging app here, but we’ve outlined the steps for five of the most popular and well-known below. If there are other apps that you use, a hunt through the settings options may well reveal the export or backup feature that you’re looking for.
Full credit to the engineers at Instagram for making this process as simple as possible. If you load up the app and tap your profile picture (bottom right), tap the three horizontal lines (top right), then choose Your activity and Transfer your information, you have the option to send your stories, photos, and videos directly to several services, including Google Photos and Dropbox.
Alternatively, choose Download your information instead of Transfer your information to save your photos and videos somewhere, and then back them up yourself. You’ll be given a download link that contains all of your posts across the timescale you’ve chosen—just be sure to choose HTML as the format type and high as the quality.
If you want to make sure future content you post is also saved to your phone’s camera roll (which can then be backed up to Google Photos, Apple Photos or another service), after tapping the three horizontal lines choose Settings and privacy then Archiving and downloading (Android), or Settings, then Preferences, then Original photos (iOS).
