Sources · Personal source · export guide
Export your Instagram data into a private AI brain
Instagram knows your taste better than your notes app does. Its JSON download — followers, captions, saved posts, topics, photo locations — becomes a brain you can ask.
What a Instagram export holds — and what the brain makes of it
An Instagram download is lighter than a Facebook one but sharper on taste: who you follow and who follows you, every caption and comment you wrote, the topics Instagram assigned you, what you liked and saved, and the location of your photos where EXIF data survived. The brain builder turns followers and following into people notes, captions and comments into your voice layer, topics and saved content into interests, and the photo places and your last-known location into map pins.
Stories are counted, not read — polls, quizzes and likes become activity counts. Direct messages contribute a per-person frequency signal only; the text is never read. If you also drop in a Facebook download, the two Meta archives are merged into the same people and places.
Get the export
How to export your Instagram data
The exact clicks, as they are today. Platforms move menus; the engine’s source docs are updated when they do.
- 01
accountscenter.facebook.com → Download your information
- 02
Choose the Instagram profile → Format JSON
- 03
Drop the archive on Instagram in Studio’s Sources — or tell Claude Code or Codex “build my brain from this”. The source is detected by itself, even inside a combined archive.
Then, next month
An export is a snapshot. Drop a newer one and press Update: your edits and _notes/ are kept, and the update report says what changed.
Then ask it
What you can ask a brain built from Instagram
Examples, not promises: the answer is whatever your notes hold, and every answer cites the notes it came from. The more exports you add, the more these questions cross sources.
- Where were my photos taken last year, by city?
- Which accounts do I follow that also follow me, and which of them do I know from elsewhere?
- What topics does Instagram think I care about?
- Which of my captions mention a place I have saved on Google Maps?
limitOnly photos that carried location data become places; the brain never guesses a location from a caption alone.
Good to know
The honest answers.
Does it read my DMs? No. DM text contributes only a per-person frequency signal — who you talk to and how often.
JSON or HTML? JSON. The HTML export is a browsable copy for humans; the brain builder reads the machine-readable JSON format.
Start
Your Instagram export already exists. Turn it into a brain.
Free and open source. Start with John’s demo brain while your export arrives.
Second Brain Studio · Mac (Apple silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux · free · MIT
Just looking? Open Studio in your browser — two demo brains, nothing to install