How much data does Instagram use

Instagram is a popular app especially among teens and has over a billion users per month. This has enabled the app to take over in the world of image sharing among social media applications.

Instagram reportedly said that it has users under the age of 25 years spending on average more than 32 minutes per day on the app. These claims were further boosted by a study that showed an average social media user will spend over five years on the apps.

You can tell that a lot of content and time spent on Instagram consumes a lot of data cumulatively. Now, what does it mean to your cellular data considering that not all of us have the luxury of being on Wi-Fi to upload and view others’ posts? This consumes cellular data which does not come cheap and knowing how much the app uses can help you make better plans.

Instagram uses about 100MB and 400MB per hour based on what activity you’re doing on the app.

Instagram is one of those apps that users have accused of hogging their data. We dug deeper to see how the data is used. Instagram is a photo and video sharing app where a user can upload their photo or a video and followers comment or like the content. People can also chat privately via inboxes and exchange content. Furthermore, there are Instagram stories that a user can share short clips with his/her followers and disappears after 24 hours.

When one view about 40 photos on their Instagram feed, the app consumes up to an MB of data. As if that is not all when you upload a photo it uses between 2 and 4MB while a video that lasts between 3 to 60 seconds will consume twice as the photo.

The Instagram stories feature consumes approximately 8MB of data to upload. The biggest challenge with using Instagram on cellular data is the videos. They are preloaded and auto play allowing you to watch them without buffering. This consumes more data in the process even if you didn’t want to watch that specific video.

How to use less data on Instagram 

There are several methods that you can use to conserve your data while using Instagram:

First method: Turn on data saver mode

Instagram settings by default allow videos to pre-load to be available for playback as quickly as possible. This ends up loading even unnecessary videos for you. You can save this and more data by activating the Data Saver mode. Go to the Instagram app and navigate to your profile and tap on the main menu denoted by three horizontal bars on the top-right hand corner. Select ‘Settings’ and then tap on ‘Account’.

On the Account screen, tap on the ‘Cellular Data Use’ button on iOS and the ‘Data Saver’ button on Android if it’s turned off. This will toggle the feature on and will go a long way in saving your data. This reduces the size of the photos and videos and loads them faster when using cellular data and will go back to usual on Wi-Fi.

Second method: Disable video preloading

Videos consume most of the data because they’re preloaded to reduce the playback time. It does this by preloading the videos and then laying them when your phone is connected to the internet over cellular data. Launch Instagram and go to your profile.

Tap on the 3 vertical dots to access the Settings menu. Scroll down to the Video section and tap on ‘Preload’. This will display the options to choose from – ‘Never’, Wi-Fi Only/ Cellular + Wi-Fi’. Select ‘Wi-Fi only’ optionto ensure that videos are only preloaded when your phone is connected to Wi-Fi.

Third method: Prevent upload from phone gallery

Every time you take a photo on Instagram, it saves it in your camera roll which consumes data unnecessarily. There are 2 ways of taking a photo and posting it on Instagram. The first way is by taking a photo with your usual camera outside the Instagram app and then sharing it on Instagram.

This method saves the original photo in your camera roll. The other way is by taking a photo inside Instagram, edit it, and then post it. Here, you have an option of either saving the original version or not saving it at all.

iPhone

Go to Settings on your phone and select the Instagram app. Open the app on your phone and go to Settings on the top-right corner and select Settings. From the list under Instagram, select Photos, and then select the ‘Never’ option to prevent Instagram from reading/writing photos to your camera roll. This will prevent the app from saving posted photos on your phone storage that have been taken on Instagram or posting photos on the app from your phone gallery.

Android

For android users, launch the Instagram app and tap on the top-right menu to open Settings. Select Settings and scroll to ‘Save Original posts’ and ‘Save posted videos’ too to turn them off. If turned off, any photo that you take with Instagram’s camera will not be saved to your camera roll. This will save you data.

Content	Viewing Approx. 40 photos	Uploading a photo	Uploading a video
Amount of data consumed	1MB	2-4MB	4-8MB

FAQs

How do I restart a video on Instagram?

Instagramauto plays videos on your feed and in the event you miss anything a video and want to rewind or restart, you can do it manually. You will, unfortunately, have to wait for the video to complete and then loop again starting from the beginning.

Can turning off Instagram notifications save data?

Yes. Notifications will pop up on your screen’s status bar when you’re not using the app. This is because the app is running in the background and is still able to send you notifications that consume data. By turning off notifications, you can save on data.