How to export your saved posts from Instagram
Instagram will give you a copy of everything you have saved. The option is buried, the file it produces is not what most people expect, and one choice along the way decides whether the export is any use at all.
Where the option is
In the app: your profile → the three lines → Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Download your information.
The choice that matters: JSON, not HTML
You will be asked for a format. Pick JSON.
HTML gives you a folder of web pages meant for reading in a browser. It looks friendlier and it is the wrong answer: the links are wrapped for display, the structure changes between exports, and anything you want to do with the file afterwards becomes guesswork. JSON is the same information in a form a program can read.
What to ask for
You can request everything, but it will be large and slow. If saved posts are what you are after, narrow the request to Saved posts — sometimes listed as "Saved items and collections". Choose the whole date range.
Instagram emails you when the file is ready. It usually takes minutes; it can take a day.
What you actually get
A zip. Inside, among a great many other files, is
saved_posts.json — a list of the posts you saved, each one a link
and a timestamp.
That is the part worth understanding before you start: the export is a list of links, not a copy of anything. No videos, no images, no captions worth reading. If a post you saved has since been deleted or made private, the link in that file leads nowhere, and the export gives you no way to tell which ones are already dead.
So what is it good for?
Two things.
It is a record. If your account is ever lost, that file is the only proof of what you had saved.
And it is a starting point. A list of links is exactly what a tool needs in order to go and fetch the videos properly — which is what AllMySaves does with it. Drop the zip in and every saved video is fetched, transcribed and indexed, so a backlog you could never search becomes searchable by what was said in it.
The ones already deleted cannot be recovered by anybody, which is why doing this sooner is better than later.
One thing worth doing while you are there
The same export screen offers your Facebook saved items if the accounts are linked. Facebook's version has a quirk that makes the HTML export unusable — covered in finding a Facebook video you saved — and the same advice applies: ask for JSON.