Why are photos missing from my Instagram download?

Want a click-by-click walkthrough of the request, with screenshots? See the full guide →

1. Your date range or quality settings left photos out

When you request a download, Instagram lets you pick a date range and a media quality. If the date range was anything other than All time, the years outside it simply aren't included. And a low quality setting can shrink or skip media. Requesting again with these set correctly is the single most common fix.

1. Set date range to "All time." This is the setting that quietly drops older years if you leave it narrow.
2. Set media quality to "High." So your photos and videos come through at full resolution.
3. Make sure "Photos and videos" is selected. Deselect everything else if you only want your media — a smaller, faster export.

2. Some of your export files were never downloaded

Instagram splits large archives into multiple files so each stays a manageable size. It's easy to download the first part, see photos, and assume that's everything — when the rest of your years are sitting in parts you skipped.

1. Go back to the download page. Each request shows all of its parts together in "Download your information."
2. Download every part. They're often numbered (for example, "part 1 of 3"). You need all of them.
3. Keep them together. When you unzip or upload them, treat the whole set as one export.

3. Your stories aged out before they were saved

This one catches a lot of people. Instagram stories disappear after 24 hours unless you saved them to your archive or added them to highlights. If Auto-Archive was turned on, your past stories are in the export. If it was off, stories you never saved are gone — they won't appear in any download, because Instagram didn't keep them either. Going forward, turn on Auto-Archive so future stories are preserved.

4. The missing photos are ones other people posted

Instagram's export only includes content you posted — your feed posts, reels, archived stories, and profile media. Photos that friends or family posted and tagged you in belong to their accounts, so they're not in your download. To keep those, you can save them from the original post, or ask the person who posted them to include those photos in their own download and share the file with you.

5. The content was deleted or the post was removed

If a photo was deleted, or posted to an account that's since been removed, it won't appear in your personal export. Your export reflects what's live on your profile at the time you request it — so if something important was removed, a current download won't bring it back.

everkeptphotos.com/gallery

Every export part, combined into one gallery — organized by year, so gaps are easy to spot.

Get a complete export — then see everything together

The reliable way to make sure nothing's missing: request a fresh download with All time, High quality, Photos and videos selected, and then download every part before the link expires.

Once you have all the parts, everkept brings them together so you can actually check. Upload the files and you get one private gallery — every photo and video combined, organized by year and grouped by the people in them, with the dates restored. Spread across years, it's easy to see at a glance whether a whole stretch of time is missing. Free to preview; one-time price to keep it, no subscription.

Common questions