If you use Instagram pretty much, then you will know the fact that download Instagram profile picture isn’t as easy it is from Facebook or Twitter. We’ve written a method about downloading photos from Instagram without using any tools. You can check that here, because it isn’t that easy find a real method with the internet being full of malware and misleading spam websites. We recently came through comments that the methods we quoted in that post aren’t working. We don’t know what happened from the Instagram side, but I say they are due to some changes in their API or sort of.

With recent changes in Instagram API, older tricks are now obsolete and we have a new one for you, which lets you see or download the profile picture of an Instagram account in 1080×1080 resolution.

How to download Instagram Profile Pictures in HD

Firstly, this method is an aggregate of various methods I’ve researched and also tested this method several times. Yes, it works with both normal and private Instagram accounts. It has just two steps: Finding the user’s unique Instagram Profile ID and finding the link to his Profile picture.

Finding Instagram user’s Profile ID

• Open any browser of your choice (I use Google Chrome), and visit the page instagram.com/<username of the person>. For example, if you want to download the profile picture of the Instagram account geekysplash, visit the page instagram.com/geekysplash .
• Right click on the page and select the option View page source. You can use the shortcut Ctrl+U as well. This shows the source of the page, containing HTML, Javascript etc.

• Now select the Find.. option from the top-right of your browser or hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard, which is a shortcut for searching in a webpage. Search for the following string of the search box “logging_page_id”. You will find a structure something like “logging_page_id”:”profilePage_XXXXXXXXXX”. In our case for the account geekysplash, we can see it as follows. “logging_page_id”:“profilePage_7085587273
• The Instagram user’s Profile user is the number followed by profilePage_ . In case of the account geekysplash, the Profile ID is 7085587273.

Finding the link to Instagram user’s Profile picture

• Use the Profile ID obtained from above step into the following URL.   https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/<ProfileID>/info/

In our case, the URL for account geekysplash is https://i.instagram.com/api/v1/users/7085587273/info/  .

• This page displays the data of the Instagram account such as their bio, name and it’s profile picture. We have 4 image URLs in that data. Each for 150×150 , 320×320, 640×640 and 1080×1080 resolutions.
• To download the photo with the highest resolution i.e 1080×1080 resolution here, search for the string hd_profile_pic_url_info . The url portion in the hd_profile_pic_url_info will return the link for the Instagram user’s profile picture in the highest resolution.

In our case,
“hd_profile_pic_url_info”: {“height”: 1080, “url”: “https://instagram.fhyd7-1.fna.fbcdn.net/vp/7fb3ec93f05d351132d345ee64174964/5C2CC6A0/t51.2885-19/41455687_977970605704738_4010954195480870912_n.jpg”, “width”: 1080},

The link beside the “url” is the link to the geekysplash Instagram’s dp i.e https://instagram.fhyd7-1.fna.fbcdn.net/vp/7fb3ec93f05d351132d345ee64174964/5C2CC6A0/t51.2885-19/41455687_977970605704738_4010954195480870912_n.jpg .

• You can copy-paste that link in another tab in your browser and save it.

That’s all guys. Using these two complex looking yet simple steps, you can download the Instagram Profile Picture of any account without using softwares, apps and span websites. Please let us know in the comments if you have any issues.