Reclaiming Instagram photos

Do you have photos you care about on Instagram? I sure do, even though I stopped using Instagram in 2021.

The good news is that you can export and download your data. Hooray! But then you have a bunch of files and some json metadata.

So...now what? I guess you could back it up somewhere.

But I'd rather actually look at my photos. I want to share them in person. I want to be able to find something later. And not just months or years later, but decades later. Generations later.

What if we had software that could help us organize, share, and archive our most important photos and videos?

What if we had better ways to capture stories and connections? To tell, and remember, and re-tell?

There's a possible future here that's very different from social media like Instagram or Facebook, very different from individual digital backup, and even very different from things like iCloud Photos and Google Photos.

What happens when we can build our archives together, with family and friends, or with shared interest groups, or with local institutions?

What does it mean to more directly support storytelling and annotations? How do we create narrative paths through our own histories?

My strong suspicion is that we'd be well served drawing from the practices of librarians and archivists, rather than just being users of mass social media or cloud storage platforms, and that we'll need some new tools that specifically support this orientation.

So there's some necessary technical work to support doing this well, and sustainably, but that should be the boring part. Like all of the best infrastructure, it should be easy to forget about, because it's quietly doing its job, supporting the meaningful activity on top of it.

I'm starting to play around with some of the foundations. What does it take to import something like an Instagram export? What data storage structures and approaches can work over the long term, without platform lock in? What user interfaces can support meaningful interactions, reflections, and conversations?

I've got some early experiments working, but I'd love to hear from you. How do you manage photos and videos, especially across a group like a family? What's worrying or difficult about the current state of things? What stories do you want to collect?