Instagram {Printing and Saving Photos}

Instagram has been one of my favorite creative tools to use while on the go with my phone.  I've gone into a more detailed description and explanation here and here if you are interested.

While I love taking and editing 1x1 {square} photos on my phone, the big question has been how to print them.  I personally use my professional printing lab, but there are all sorts of companies now that offer direct access to your Instagram photos for easy printing.  You can print anything from regular prints and canvases to sticker books, mini books, and even calendars.  One of the companies I found with the most options is Prinstagram.  But there are also printing options with Instacanvas, Origrami, Canvaspop, or Persnickity Prints.  I've never personally used any of these companies, but I do plan on ordering some stickers soon from Canvaspop.

There is an option on your Instagram account that allows you to save the full resolution photo to your device.  This is previously how I was saving and using my photos.  If you don't save your photo when you initially post it, you can email it to yourself straight from Instagram.  The downfall with this is the size of your photo ends up being about 8 KB.  Basically too small to print at all.  

This is what your Settings Screen looks like

Just make sure that the "Save Original Photos" is "on"

When you post a photo through Instagram, the resolution is already low.  I imagine this is because they are housing millions and millions of photos on a server somewhere and try to keep the photo to a minimum file size.  What does this mean?  Well, basically that the quality of your photo is good enough to print, but the print will have to be on the small side.  The Instagram printing companies seem to print as large as 20x20, but I wouldn't go larger than 12x12 (my opinion).

Now what happens if say, you have 5000 photos on your cell phone and it crashes... and the Instagram photos never got backed up?  Well, that happened to me and after my mild panic attack, I figured I would google it.  And like magic, the answer appeared (what did we do before google??).  There is a website called Instaport.  You can access your Instagram photos through this website and it will download whichever photos you choose (I chose the last 200 photos) into a pretty little file.  And the best part?  They are all the high resolution photos. :)  Phew....

Now I can print my favorite NYC Instagram photo to complete my New York City shelf.

Capturing the Moment,

Corrie <3