What to do with your Instagram archive after you download it

Haven't downloaded your archive yet? See the download guide →

everkeptphotos.com/gallery

Your archive, turned into one gallery — organized by year and by the people in it.

What's actually inside the archive

When you unzip the file Instagram sends you, you don't get a tidy photo folder. You get a complete data export built for completeness, not for browsing. Your media is unpacked into nested folders — your posts, reels, stories, and tagged content land in separate places — often with cryptic filenames, and with videos sitting apart from photos.

Unlike Facebook, Instagram has no "albums" to lean on, so there's even less built-in structure to fall back on. If you chose the HTML format, there's an index file you can open in a browser, but it's a plain list, not a gallery you'd want to sit and look through.

Why it's hard to use as-is

1. The dates are often stripped. The original capture dates frequently don't survive the export, so your files can show the export date instead of when the photo or reel was actually taken. That breaks any attempt to sort by time.
2. Photos and videos are separated. A moment that included a photo and a reel ends up in two different places, so your memories don't sit together.
3. Everything is buried in folders. Years of posts, reels, and stories spread across subfolders is exhausting to dig through — and easy to abandon.
4. There's a lot you don't want. The archive also contains account data that isn't photos at all, which you have to wade past to find your media.

Your options from here

Option 1 — Organize it by hand

You can copy all the media out of the nested folders into one place, then sort it into year folders yourself. This is free and keeps everything on your own computer. The downside is the work: it's slow, the missing dates make sorting guesswork, and grouping photos by the people in them is essentially impossible to do manually at any scale.

Option 2 — Back it up to the cloud as-is

You can drop the whole unzipped archive into a cloud drive so it's safe. That solves "don't lose it," but not "actually enjoy it" — it's still a folder mess, just a backed-up one.

Option 3 — Turn it into a gallery automatically

This is the part the download guides skip. Upload the ZIP to everkept and you get one private gallery — every post, reel, story, and tagged photo together, organized by year and grouped by the people in them, with the dates restored. No folder-digging, no manual sorting. Free to preview; one-time price to keep it, no subscription.

Common questions