How to Download Your Instagram Followers & Following Data (Step by Step)

Instagram’s data export tool moved and got renamed fairly recently — it’s now called Export your information, not the older “Download your information” you might have seen in older guides (including earlier versions of this one). The underlying idea is the same, but a few screens and button names changed, so here’s the current path, menu by menu.

Where to find it

1. Open the Instagram app (this also works from a browser at instagram.com — the menu structure is the same).
2. Go to your profile, then Settings and privacy.
3. Tap Accounts Center — this is a Meta-wide settings hub that covers Instagram, Facebook, and any other Meta accounts you have linked, so make sure you’re exporting the right account if you have more than one.
4. Under Accounts Center, tap Your information and permissions.
5. Tap Export your information.
6. Tap Create export.

That last tap starts a short wizard — profile, destination, then the category screen where the decisions that actually matter happen.

Picking the profile and where it goes

The wizard first asks which profile to export, if you have more than one Instagram account linked to the same Accounts Center — pick the one you actually want data from.

Next it asks where the export should go. Choose Export to device. (Depending on the category you’re exporting, Meta sometimes offers to send specific data types — like photos — to a connected service instead; none of that applies here, since followers and following isn’t a media category.)

Customize information: the screen where it actually matters

This is the step that decides whether your export finishes in a couple of minutes or takes most of a day. You’ll land on a Customize information screen listing every data category Instagram has about your account — Posts, Comments, Messages, Search history, Ads information, and so on, all the way down to Connections.

Leave everything unchecked except:

• Connections → Followers
• Connections → Following

Selecting more doesn’t get you anything useful for a followers comparison — it just bundles in every message you’ve ever sent, every photo, every comment, sometimes gigabytes of unrelated data, and dramatically slows down how long Instagram takes to actually build the file. If you accidentally check something else, you can uncheck it before confirming — just double-check the summary before you move on.

Format: JSON, not HTML

On the same customization screen, you’ll be asked to pick a file format: HTML or JSON. This trips people up constantly, because HTML sounds friendlier — “I can just open it in a browser and read it” — but that’s exactly the problem for anything that needs to parse it. HTML exports are built for a human to click through, with layout and styling wrapped around the data, which makes them unreliable for any tool to read automatically.

JSON is the plain, structured version — it’s what every legitimate follower-comparison tool expects, including this one. If you’ve already got an HTML export sitting around, it’s not salvageable for this purpose; you’d need to re-request it as JSON.

Date range: All time (not “Last year”)

The same screen offers a full menu of date ranges: Last week, Last month, Last 3 months, Last 6 months, Last year, Last 3 years, All time, and a Custom range with its own start and end date picker. Every one of them except All time is a trap for this use case — pick All time.

Here’s the part that isn’t obvious from the menu: this filter doesn’t give you a snapshot of “who followed me as of that date.” It filters by when each follow relationship started. So if you choose “Last year,” Instagram quietly leaves out anyone who’s followed you (or who you follow) for longer than a year — even though they’re still following you today. Your export ends up missing a chunk of your actual, current followers, and every count downstream (mutuals, fans, ghosts, follow-back rate) comes out wrong as a result.

It also means the date range can’t do double duty as a way to “look back in time.” There’s no option here that reconstructs what your follower list looked like three years ago — Instagram doesn’t keep that kind of historical snapshot for you to request. The date filter only ever describes today’s relationships, narrowed by how long ago they began. The only way to actually compare two points in time is to have two real exports, taken on two different days, each requested with All time selected — which is exactly what unfollowmap’s two-export path is for.

One more consequence worth spelling out: if you ever use two exports with different date ranges to compare against each other — say, an old one you set to “Last year” and a new one set to “All time” — the diff will be wrong in both directions. People the old export excluded (because they’d followed you for longer than a year at the time) will show up as false “new followers,” and it can produce false “unfollows” the same way. Keep every export you ever take set to All time, and this never comes up.

There’s occasionally a media quality selector on this same screen too (it affects photos/videos in other categories) — it’s irrelevant here since Connections isn’t a media category, so it’s safe to leave on whatever default is selected.

Confirming: a password prompt

Once you tap Create export (sometimes labeled Start export) to confirm your selections, Instagram will ask you to re-enter your account password. This isn’t the tool asking for your password — it’s Instagram itself, on Instagram’s own screen, confirming that the person requesting a copy of the account’s data is actually the account owner. That distinction matters: you’re authenticating directly to Instagram, not handing your password to a third party (see why that difference is the whole safety story if you want the longer version).

Waiting for it

Instagram builds the file on its own servers in the background — not instantly. For a followers/following-only request, it’s often ready within a few minutes to a few hours; Meta’s own guidance allows for up to about two days during busier periods, though a request this small rarely takes that long in practice.

You’ll get a notification and usually an email titled something like “Your Instagram Information” when it’s ready. You can also go back into Accounts Center → Export your information and check the Available downloads section directly rather than waiting on the email.

A few things worth knowing while you wait:

• You can request more than one export in a row. If you’re setting up a before/after comparison and don’t already have an old export saved, you can’t retroactively create one — an export only reflects your account right now. The “before” side of any comparison has to be something you already exported in the past.
• The download link expires — Meta gives you a few days (around four) to actually download the file from Available downloads before it goes stale and you’d need to request it again.
• It arrives as a ZIP. Don’t unzip it manually — tools built for this (including unfollowmap) read the ZIP directly and pull out the two files they need (followers_1.json and following.json) without you having to touch the contents.

Common mistakes that produce a bad export

Selecting more categories than Connections. The single biggest cause of “it’s been hours and nothing happened” — every extra category you check multiplies how much Instagram has to bundle up.

Choosing HTML instead of JSON. Produces a file that looks fine to a human and is basically unusable to a parser.

Picking a shorter date range. “Last year” sounds harmless but silently drops anyone whose relationship with you started earlier than that — your followers count comes out too low with no error or warning telling you why.

Exporting the wrong profile. If you manage multiple Instagram accounts under one Accounts Center, it’s easy to pick the wrong one at the profile-selection step. Double-check before you confirm.

Not saving the file anywhere memorable. Once downloaded, that ZIP is your only copy of this snapshot in time. If you want to compare against it later — say, to see who’s unfollowed you since today — you’ll need to still have it. Instagram doesn’t keep a browsable history of your past exports.

Instagram updates this flow periodically, and exact wording can vary slightly by account, region, or app version — if a label here doesn’t match exactly what you see, look for the nearest equivalent; the underlying steps (profile → destination → categories → format → date range → confirm) tend to stay the same even when the names shuffle around it.

What to do with it once you have it

At this point you’ve got a ZIP file sitting in your downloads folder containing two JSON files: your followers and the accounts you follow, each with a timestamp for when that relationship started. That’s genuinely all the raw material behind every “who doesn’t follow me back” or “who unfollowed me” tool out there — the rest is just comparing lists.

If you want to see that comparison without writing it yourself, unfollowmap reads the ZIP directly in your browser — nothing is uploaded anywhere — and shows you mutuals, fans, ghosts, and, if you upload a second export later, exactly who’s changed since last time.