Instagram Reconstituer
March 19th 2025
Instagram is never going to get better. The same goes for all the big social sites—Facebook, Xitter, Reddit, and the like. Sure, there’s some enshittification happening, but it’s mostly about them keeping your eyes glued to a feed full of low-quality ads and posts from strangers. A friend might send you a link, and before you know it, you’ve spent half an hour scrolling through junk.
So, I finally deleted my Instagram account. I didn’t want to be a product they could sell or deal with all their pandering politics. And with Instagram getting worse every day, the choice became easier.
But I wasn’t ready to lose my Instagram entirely. It’s a neat slice of my history, so I exported all my data. What I got was a mess—450 JSON files and 4500 other files that aren’t very easy to browse. On top of that, some image files had the wrong extensions.
I first thought about making one HTML file you could just drop your export into. But thanks to modern browsers and their CORS rules, that wasn’t possible because the JSON files couldn’t be read directly. So, I ended up writing a PHP script that processes all the JSON, video, and image files to build a single HTML file along with a folder of images.
The PHP script grew into a jumble of fallbacks and error checks just to handle all the quirks in the data. I’m convinced they made the export as unwieldy as possible on purpose. Many HEIC files are actually JPGs with the wrong extensions, many videos lack thumbnails, and so on. It’s a perfect example of how platforms make it hard to leave—even when they let you “take your data with you.”
My tool—named Memento Mori (a bit overdramatically)—takes all those files and builds a neat website you can host on your own server. It even shows a date span from your first post to your last post. It feels a bit odd to recreate Instagram’s look to get away from Instagram, but I wanted to make it easier for folks to break free.
Anyway, here’s my export.