The 300-post limit
Instagram only shows you your 300 most recently liked posts. Go to Settings → Your activity → Likes, and you'll see a grid — but scroll past 300 and it stops. Everything you liked before that is invisible to you inside the app.
This isn't a bug. It's a deliberate limit. Instagram's web interface doesn't even show the Likes section at all — you can only see them in the mobile app, and only the most recent 300.
Your older likes are still on Instagram's servers. They're in your account data. You just can't see them through the app's interface.
How to get all of them
The only way to see every post you've ever liked is through Instagram's Download Your Information tool. When you request your data export, Instagram generates a complete list of every post you've ever liked — not just the last 300, but all of them, going back to the day you created your account.
Here's how:
- Open Instagram → Settings → Accounts Center → Your information and permissions → Download your information
- Select your Instagram account
- Choose Some of your information → select Likes
- Set format to JSON (not HTML — you need structured data)
- Set date range to All time
- Submit and wait — usually arrives within hours, sometimes up to 48
When the ZIP arrives, open it and look for a file called likes.json (or likes_media_likes.json inside the likes folder). Inside is a list of every post you've ever liked — with the username, the post URL, and the timestamp of when you liked it.
The catch: the export is a list, not a backup
Here's what nobody tells you: the export doesn't contain the actual photos and videos. It contains links to them. And those links are signed URLs that expire within days.
So you get a complete list of every post you've ever liked — but if you want the actual photos and videos, you need to download them before the links die.
How to download the actual media
This is what UnplugMe does. You drop the export ZIP into the extension, and it:
- Reads the
likes.jsonfile and finds every liked post - Downloads the actual photo or video for each one using your authenticated session
- Saves them to your hard drive, organized in a folder called "Liked"
- Runs in the background — start it, close the window, it keeps going
- Resumes if interrupted — laptop sleeps, Chrome restarts, it picks up where it left off
First 50 downloads are free. $23 one-time for unlimited (not a subscription).
What about the 300-post limit in the app?
Instagram's "Posts You've Liked" section in the app is limited to 300 posts by design. There is no setting to change this. The data export is the only way to see beyond the 300-post wall.
Some third-party tools claim to "download all your liked posts" by scrolling the Likes section in the browser — but they hit the same 300-post limit because they're scrolling the same interface you are. The only way past the limit is the data export, which pulls from Instagram's database, not the app's display layer.
Why the links expire
Instagram serves photos and videos from its CDN (content delivery network) using signed URLs — links with an embedded authentication token and an expiration timestamp. These tokens typically expire within hours.
This is a security feature: it ensures that only authenticated sessions can access content. But it means that the URLs in your data export stop working within days of receiving the ZIP. If you sit on the export for a month, the links are dead.
This is why you need a tool like UnplugMe to download the media quickly — before the links expire. The export tells you what you liked. UnplugMe downloads the actual files before the signed URLs die.
Can I do this without a tool?
Yes — but it's manual. You'd open the likes.json file, copy each URL, paste it into your browser while logged into Instagram, and save each photo or video manually. For 300 liked posts, that's 300 clicks. For 3,000, it's 3,000. For 10,000, it's not feasible.
The data export gives you the complete list. The tool gives you the actual files. You need both.
UnplugMe is a personal data portability tool. It reads your official Instagram data export and downloads content you already have access to, using your own authenticated session. Nothing leaves your device. First 50 downloads are free — try it here.