Instagram is a popular social media platform that allows users to share their photos and videos with friends and the general public.
With all the cool potentials of the application, one of the features some users like myself often want to be turned off is the automatic saving of photos and video files back on your smartphone gallery which often cause unneeded duplication that gobbles up unnecessary storage space.
I totally understand the good intention of this feature as it helps people save their edited photos easily which is something that Instagram was once known for except there are literally hundreds of photo manipulating tools for smartphones nowadays so using Instagram to edit photos is very outdated.
Anyway, if you find yourself struggling with this issue, you’re in the right place. In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through the steps to stop Instagram from saving your uploaded pictures back to your smartphone gallery.
Disabling the auto-save edited pictures/videos on Instagram
There are two ways you take and post photos on Instagram:
- In this approach, you can make use of your regular smartphone’s camera app or a third-party camera app of your choice to take a photo or record a video and then post it on Instagram. When you do this, the original picture will still be there, but you can decide whether to keep the edited version or not.
- Or you can simply capture your photo or video using Instagram’s camera feature and make edits within the app. The downside of this method is that the resulting quality may be lower. However, if you don’t mind, you can choose to save or delete your edited photo or video.
Disable Autosaving pictures on Instagram for Android
This simple guide will help you stop Instagram from auto-saving original photos and videos on your Android smartphones
Visit your Instagram profile
Navigate to your profile by clicking on your profile avatar at the bottom right corner of the screen
Then go to the settings area of your account
When you’re in that interface, click on the hamburger menu at the top right corner to open the settings area which is located at the bottom with the label “Settings”.
Scroll to the “Your App and Media” section
Instagram recently made some design changes and rearrangements. So here’s where we’re going. Click on the first option with the label “Archiving and Dowloading“.
Toggle Off/On what you want
On this screen, you’ll see a couple of features among which are “Save Original Photos” and “Save Story to Gallery“. For this post, we’ll toggle off both of these features. That way, when next you upload and edit an image or a video, its original format won’t be duplicated back in your smartphone gallery.
- Remember, if you take your photos with the native camera app on your phone and share them on Instagram, the original photo is always going to be in your camera roll.
- If you turn off Save posted photos and Save posted videos: photos and videos you post on Instagram will not be saved on your Android device’s camera roll…hence, no duplication.
Disable Autosaving pictures on Instagram for iOS
Just as stated above (in the Android tutorial), navigate to your profile by clicking on your Avatar at the bottom right and then navigate to the settings area and look for “Save Original Photos” and toggle off the “Save Original” feature.
When you turn off Save Original Photos, photos you take with your Instagram app’s camera will not be saved on your iPhone’s camera roll anymore.
However, once you post it, that version will still be saved on the camera roll which means there is more to it. Next, you should head to your iPhone’s General Settings and then go to Instagram and select Photos.
From the interface, you can decide on what you want to be saved on your device.
- If you select “Never”, this will disable Instagram’s ability to read and write from your camera roll. With that, the application will not save posted photos to your camera roll any longer. If you use the Instagram app’s camera and don’t want to save any photos, this is your option.
- If you want to use your phone’s native camera app and post photos to Instagram from there, then you need to select Read and Write. But then be aware that both original and posted photos will again be saved on your camera roll.
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