How to Export Your Instagram Followers List (Officially)

If you want a clean export of every account that follows you on Instagram, there is exactly one official way to do it. You request your own data archive through Instagram's Download Your Information tool, choose JSON, and the file lands in your inbox. No password apps, no scraping, no risk to your account.

This post walks through the export, the format you get back, how to turn it into a CSV, and what the list is actually useful for.

The official method: Download Your Information

Instagram has a built-in tool for exporting your own data. It lives under Settings -> Accounts Center -> Your information and permissions -> Download your information. It is the same tool you would use to back up your photos, your DMs, or your search history. The followers list is one slice of that archive. If you would like every screen of the request flow with screenshots, the full Instagram data export guide walks the whole path.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Use the desktop site if you can. The mobile app hides some of the format options, and JSON is the one you want.
• Pick "Some of your information" instead of "All of your information." A full archive can be several gigabytes. The followers slice is usually under a megabyte.
• Choose "All time" as the date range. Older follower entries are the most interesting ones — they tell you who has been around the longest.

Once you submit the request, Instagram queues the export. Most people get the download link within thirty minutes. Larger accounts can wait up to forty-eight hours. The link arrives by email and stays valid for four days.

What you actually get back

The ZIP unpacks into a folder structure. The followers file lives at connections/followers_and_following/followers_1.json. If you follow a lot of accounts, the file you also care about is following.json in the same folder.

Each entry in followers_1.json looks roughly like this:

{
  "title": "",
  "media_list_data": [],
  "string_list_data": [
    {
      "href": "https://www.example.com/usernamegoeshere/",
      "value": "usernamegoeshere",
      "timestamp": 1738435200
    }
  ]
}

Three fields matter:

• value — the username.
• href — the link to their profile.
• timestamp — Unix epoch seconds for when they followed you.

That timestamp is the most useful field in the whole export. The Instagram app does not show you a follow date anywhere. The data archive does. You can sort by it to see who has been with you longest, or who joined in the last week.

Converting the JSON to a CSV

JSON is great for code. CSV is great for spreadsheets. Most people want the second one.

The fastest way is a free online JSON-to-CSV converter — paste the file, get the CSV. If you would rather keep the data on your machine, three lines of Python do it:

import json, csv
data = json.load(open("followers_1.json"))
with open("followers.csv", "w", newline="") as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    w.writerow(["username", "profile_url", "followed_at"])
    for row in data:
        d = row["string_list_data"][0]
        w.writerow([d["value"], d["href"], d["timestamp"]])

That gives you a spreadsheet-friendly file with three columns: username, profile URL, and the followed-at timestamp. Open it in Numbers, Excel, or Google Sheets and sort by the timestamp column to see the oldest followers first.

If you want human-readable dates instead of Unix seconds, add a column in your spreadsheet with =A2/86400 + DATE(1970,1,1) and format as a date. Done. If the Python step felt like overkill, hooleft.me handles the conversion for you in the background and skips the spreadsheet entirely.

What the list is actually for

Most people export their followers for one of four reasons:

The unfollow comparison is the most common. You take an export from March, another from April, and the usernames missing from April are the people who walked away. Doing that manually in a spreadsheet works, but it is fiddly — you end up writing VLOOKUPs at midnight.

That is the part hooleft.me automates. You drop the ZIP in, it parses the file, and shows you the followers list in a clean view with sortable dates, a search box, and a comparison against any earlier snapshot you upload. No password. No DM scraping. Just your own data, read for you. The free tier on hooleft.me is enough for one-off exports — you do not need to pay anything to look once.

Comparison: app vs export vs hooleft.me

The bottom two rows are the only honest options. Everything that asks for your Instagram password is either against the rules or one breach away from being a problem. Between those two, the export-only path leaves you with the JSON to read; hooleft.me reads it for you.

FAQ

Can I export my Instagram followers list to a CSV directly?

Not from the app. Instagram only exports your followers as JSON or HTML. You convert the JSON to CSV with a small script or a free online converter — it takes about thirty seconds.

Is exporting my followers list against Instagram's rules?

Exporting your own data is allowed — Instagram provides the download tool for exactly this. Scraping other people's followers with a third-party app is the part that breaks the rules.

How many followers can I export this way?

All of them. The Instagram archive includes every follower and every account you follow, regardless of count. Large accounts just get a bigger file.

Does the export show when each person followed me?

Yes. Each entry includes the username, the profile URL, and a Unix timestamp of when they followed you. That timestamp is the most underrated field in the file.

How often should I export my followers list?

Once a month is enough for most people. If you run a business account or post often, weekly snapshots make trends visible.

Where to go next

If you came here to see who left, the export is exactly half of the answer — the other half is a second export, taken later, and a diff between the two. That workflow has its own walkthrough in how to see who unfollowed you on Instagram. If you want to understand what else is inside that ZIP before you open it, how the Instagram data download actually works goes deeper.

If JSON files and VLOOKUPs are not your idea of a Saturday, drop the ZIP into hooleft.me and you will see your followers list in seconds — sortable, searchable, and ready to compare against your next snapshot. We built hooleft.me precisely so you do not have to choose between knowing and JSON wrangling.

Either way, you now have a list. It is your list. What you do with it is up to you.