4 Ways to Download Instagram Videos

The easiest ways to watch Instagram videos offline on any device.

Photo: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)

 Instagram recently reminded everyone it is “no longer a photo sharing app or a square photo sharing app,” and indeed, parent company Facebook wants it to be the hub for sharing videos of all kinds, from TikTok-style Reels to YouTube-like longer videos on IGTV. As the number of videos on Instagram grows, so does the need to save them to view offline.

After all, you won’t always have a good internet connection. Why miss out on Instagram videos when you’re up in the hills or during your next long flight? Luckily, it’s possible to download Instagram videos and take them with you wherever you go.

Before we show you how to do that across all of your devices, it’s worth noting that these methods tend to break every once in a while. Instagram changes its APIs more than most other services, which means that the method for downloading videos, photos, or stories, keeps changing along with them. In most cases, the methods we recommended will work because the developers engineering them update their apps or automations regularly. However, there is a small chance that any of these methods could stop working, if only temporarily.

Method 1

The best way to download Instagram videos on iPhone is through Apple’s Siri Shortcuts app. It’s where you’ll find all kinds of extensions and automations for iOS, and there is a really good shortcut that lets you download Instagram videos too. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Shortcuts app on your iPhone.
2. Open the app, go to the Gallery tab, and tap any shortcut you see there.
3. Download the shortcut and run it once. Doing this will allow you to run shortcuts made by people in the iOS automation community.
4. After running any shortcut once on your device, go to Settings > Shortcuts.
5. Enable Allow Untrusted Shortcuts.
6. Now we’re ready to download the shortcut that will help you download media from Instagram. Go to the RoutineHub page for Instagram Download using your iPhone. (RoutineHub is a third-party gallery for Siri Shortcuts.)
7. On your device, tap the Get Shortcut button—once on RoutineHub, and again on iCloud.com’s download page.
8. This will open the Instagram Download shortcut in the Shortcuts app on your device. Scroll to the bottom and tap the red Add Untrusted Shortcut button to add this shortcut to your iPhone.
9. Finally, download Scriptable from the App Store. It allows you to run JavaScript on iPhone, and it’ll be used to download Instagram videos. In a nutshell, Instagram limits how many times you can access its server if you’re not logged in, and Scriptable will help you get around that limitation.
10. With everything downloaded and set up, open Instagram and tap the three-dots icon in the top-right corner of any post and tap Share to.
11. You’ll now see the iPhone share sheet. Scroll down and select Instagram Download. The shortcut will ask for access to some websites, your photo gallery, and will walk you through a short set up process.
12. Complete all of this and you’ll be asked to log in to Instagram using a browser inside Scriptable. While doing that, be sure to select the Save Login Info option to ensure that Scriptable keeps you logged in to Instagram.

That’s it! Follow the process in step 11 to download pretty much anything and everything posted to Instagram. The saved items will appear in the Photos app on your iPhone.

Method 2

On Android, there are several apps that let you download Instagram videos. We’re going to use one of them to quickly save videos for offline viewing. Follow these steps:

1. Download Video Downloader for Instagram.
2. Open Instagram and go to the video you want to download. Tap the three-dots icon in the top-right.
3. Tap Copy Link.
4. Switch back to Video Downloader for Instagram and the app will automatically paste the link you just copied. It even begins downloading the video for you.

When the video’s downloaded, it’ll appear in the Photos or Gallery app on your Android phone.

Method 3

If you want to download Instagram videos on a desktop or a laptop, you can also use an app to do so.

1. Download 4K Video Downloader on Windows, macOS, or Ubuntu Linux. (We’ve previously recommended this app for downloading YouTube videos.)
2. Go to Instagram and copy the link to the video you wish to download. On desktop, you can right-click any video and then select Copy Link.
3. Open 4K Video Downloader and click the green Paste Link button.
4. The app will show you a pop-up allowing you to view the format and save location for the file. (If you only want to grab the audio, you can simply choose Extract Audio from the dropdown menu.) When ready, click Download.
5. When it’s done downloading, right-click the video’s name in 4K Video Downloader and select Play to watch it right away, or Show in Finder (which may be labeled a little differently on Windows and Linux) to view where the video file is saved on your computer.

The same company makes another app, 4K Stogram, that lets you download other types of Instagram posts, such as photos and stories. Note that not all features are available for free on that app.

Method 5

For those who are unable to (or don’t want to) download apps on their devices, web-based Instagram downloaders will do the job just fine. There are plenty of them, most of which work fairly well, so a quick Google search should lead you to a decent option. One we recommend is called Igram—here’s how you can download Instagram videos using that site:

1. Open Instagram and copy the link to any video.
2. Go to the Igram website and paste the link in the search bar.
3. Click the blue Download button.
4. Igram will download and save the video to your computer.

You can now view the Instagram video whenever you want to.