Today it seems every social media or messaging app under Facebook’s umbrella has a Snapchat-inspired story feature. Insta-stories were introduced in August 2016, and ever since, it has become one of the most popular features on Instagram.
What if you want a post to last longer than 24 hours? What if it’s a funny video or meme you feel you need to add to your collection and share later? There are various reasons (beyond creepy stalking) to want to download Instagram Stories, and thankfully, there are quite a few ways to do it.
Also read: How to Add Photos to Your Instagram Reels
1. Use a Download Website
Before moving on to the third-party apps (some of them paid), it’s worth seeing whether you can get the Instagram Stories you need through a download website. This method is often simpler and doesn’t require an Instagram sign-in, but that could mean you won’t be able to download Stories if, for example, it’s a private account.
There are various sites you can try using for the job. Toolzu is one and doesn’t require any kind of sign-in. Another is Story Saver. There are several sites like this you can try, though often they lack the features of third-party apps.
If you want a bit more granular control over downloading those Instagram Stories, read on.
Also read: How to Create Guides on Instagram
2. Using 4k Stogram
4K Stogram is currently one of the most well-equipped cross-platform applications to deal with anything that has to do with Instagram. Do note, however, that in order to download Stories, you’ll need to check out the premium version of 4K Stogram.
Before you can download stories with 4K Stogram, you need to log in to your Instagram account from the software. Click the profile icon in the top-right corner of the app, then sign in.
Once you’ve done that, head over to “Tools -> Preferences” to set everything up the way you want it: your download folder, how your downloaded Instagram content is sorted, and so on.
Next, enter the name of the account from which you want to download Stories into the main box in 4K Stogram, then click the Settings icon next to “Download” and select “Download Stories.” You can also narrow the date range from which to download stories.
Click the orange “Download” box to start the download.
Also read: How to Delete One Photo from a Carousel Post or Stories on Instagram
3. Download the Entire Web Page
For this example I used both Chrome and Firefox. Chrome works for images but has a hard time with videos, while Firefox had no problems at all.
1. Open the Instagram story you want to capture.
2. Right-click on either side of the rectangle where the story is displayed (not on the video or picture but any empty space around it). This will give you a context menu.
3. From the menu, select “Save As” or “Save page as” (if you’re using Firefox).
4. This will display the “Save as” screen. From here, you can select where you want to save the web page. You can name it whatever you want; I would advise that you keep the “html” extension though. Make sure to selection “Web Page, Complete” as the save as type at the bottom of the screen.
5. Open file explorer (or any application you use as a file browser). Navigate to where you saved the Instagram Stories web page. Every time you save a complete web page, it will create an accompanying resource folder where it stores files like pictures and scripts.
The folder should be named after the web page and suffixed with “_files.” For example, if the name of your saved web page is “Stories • Instagram,” the name of the resource folder would be “Stories • Instagram_files.” Navigate to the resource folder.
6. In the resource folder you will find a list of files responsible for making the web page display correctly. What we are interested in here are the pictures. I suggest you sort the files here by their type and view the files as either large or extra-large icons. This will allow you to see the thumbnail of the picture from the story you are looking for.
7. After finding the picture, you can delete the web page and everything else in the resource folder.
The biggest disadvantage with this method is that it’s wasteful and a bit time consuming. The benefit here is that all you need is a simple web browser – no extensions required.
Also read: How to Use “Add Yours” Stickers in Instagram Stories
4. Using Chrono Download Manager
Chrono manager is a multi-purpose extension for Chromium-based web browsers. It replaces the default download manager with a highly customizable one. It comes with a sniffer that can be used to find and download pictures, videos, links and documents from a web page.
Chrono’s sniffer makes downloading stories much easier. You can even download story videos in different variants and sizes. Chrono allows you to download a user’s stories in bulk, which means you do not have to download them one by one.
1. From your browser, open the Instagram stories you want to download. You can let the stories run until near completion, but make sure you click on the Instagram stories “Close” button before it completely runs the last one, or it will redirect you back to your Instagram home page, and Chrono sniffer will lose the list of stories.
2. Click on the Chrono extension icon on your browser. If it displays the download list, just click on the sniffer icon in the top-right corner of the list.
3. The Chrono sniffer gives you four main sections separated by tabs: video, image, document and other. Since Instagram stories are most likely to be the first two, we are focusing on those sections. Under the video section you may find that the Chrono sniffer has come back with a long list of links. If you want to know which ones are the stories, just check the “Remarks” in the list. Generally, stories have this remark: “Stories • Instagram.”
4. My only gripe with the Chrono sniffer is that it does not have thumbnails for videos, and you cannot really tell which is which by the links. You will have to do some guesswork, trial and error or download all the videos and delete the ones you don’t want. You may find that some of these videos are the same but differ in qualities, variants and/or sizes. That is because Instagram automatically switches the quality to suit a user’s Internet speed. You can select and tick each link you want to download from the list or just select everything.
5. It is easy to distinguish between which pictures you want to download and which ones you do not. Just make sure you have “Preview” ticked. Again, Instagram story images will have the remark “Stories • Instagram” next to them. You can sort them using this heading. Once you have done that, you can choose which images you want to download.
There’s more than one way to steal the Instagram story of your dreams. I would be remiss if I told you that these were even the best methods. Maybe you’re into making your own Instagram Stories? If so, find out how to add music to your Story or how to add a link to your Stories. We also have a guide on sending disappearing photos and videos on Instagram.
Also read: How to Add Voice and Related Effects to Instagram Reels
Image credit: Instagram button by Yay Images
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