Le’t say you are currently browsing Instagram on PC/laptop (your cellphone is somewhere else, probably turned off) and stumbled upon a lovely image of Yosemite Park, like this:
The image looks very interesting so naturally you want to save it, right?
Sure. And it supposed to be easy, right? Just do a right click on the image, then click “Save As…” bla bla bla.
Well not that easy, bro. But still you can download the photos. Keep reading.
I did some experimentations by viewing the HTML code. Right click and hit “View Page Source” (I use Firefox, other browsers may have different menu name).
![](http://blog.anta40.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ff_ss_1-1024x453.png)
You’ll see another tab opened, displaying gobbledygook like this:
![](http://blog.anta40.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ff_ss_2.png)
Good. You are on the the right track. You may ask “what the hell is this? I have no idea even on a single damn line?”
Me either. You don’t need to understand those lines. All you have to do is search (hit Ctrl+F) for the word display_url. Then you’ll see this:
![](http://blog.anta40.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ff_ss_3-1024x37.png)
Pay attention for the matching quotations marks. You’ll find this:
https://instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t51.2885-15/e35/93478287_233551107984990_196381950596017104_n.jpg?_nc_ht=instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net\u0026_nc_cat=106\u0026_nc_ohc=nF9-R195pD8AX_rEkQh\u0026oh=2ca18433079835bbf562b8b11ee7a1c3\u0026oe=5ED118BD
Wohoo we just got the image URL! Let’s open that in the browser.
![](http://blog.anta40.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ff_ss_4.png)
Aww crap. It does’t work. What’s wrong? Upon further inspection, I found something interesting in the image URL:
https://instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t51.2885-15/e35/93478287_233551107984990_196381950596017104_n.jpg?_nc_ht=instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net\u0026_nc_cat=106\u0026_nc_ohc=nF9-R195pD8AX_rEkQh\u0026oh=2ca18433079835bbf562b8b11ee7a1c3\u0026oe=5ED118BD
Do you see\u0026 appear a few times? What does it mean? A quick Google search points that \u0026 is the Unicode value for ‘&‘ (ampersand). So what if we replace all \u0026 with & into this:
https://instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t51.2885-15/e35/93478287_233551107984990_196381950596017104_n.jpg?_nc_ht=instagram.fcgk23-1.fna.fbcdn.net&_nc_cat=106&_nc_ohc=nF9-R195pD8AX_rEkQh&oh=2ca18433079835bbf562b8b11ee7a1c3&oe=5ED118BD
Is this going to work? No idea. Let’s try this on the browser.
![](http://blog.anta40.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ff_ss_5-1024x814.jpg)
Mission accomplished. You just managed to save an Instagram image. Without using special app/browser addons 🙂