Save Instagram Photos to iPhone Camera Roll

Update: Instasave has been updated(1.2-2) to work perfectly with the new version of Instagram. If you’ve got Instasave installed already, make sure you update the package to the latest version.

Instagram is a great way to discover interesting photos on the web. With the level of popularity Instagram has achieved, it can very well be termed the Facebook of photo tags. Needless to say, Facebook actually acquired Instagram recently.

No matter how awesome the app is, there’s one thing missing: save photos to your Camera Roll.

Of course, there’s InstaSave on the App Store which lets you do these things:

• Save individual photos to your camera roll
• Save multiple photos to the camera roll simultaneously
• And pretty much other interaction features like “like”, “comment” and “repost”

And the InstaSave for Instagram will cost you $0.99.

But surely, that’s not what we’re after, are we? Something as simple as being able to copy an Instagram photo to our camera roll should be … free? Other than the fact that Instagram should’ve included that option themselves, it looks like we’ll need to get a little deeper.

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone running Cydia, you’ve got the answer. No surprise, the Cydia tweak that will let you save Instagram photos to your camera roll is called InstaSave, too.

InstaSave is a simple, no-configuration-required tweak. What it does is adds a Save option to the menu in Instagram.

When you view a photo on Instagram, tap the ellipsis icon to pop open the menu options. Usually, you’d see these three options:

• Report Inappropriate
• Share to Facebook
• Tweet

After you install InstaSave from Cydia, you should now get another option labeled Save. Tap that and the image gets saved to your camera roll. As simple as that.

If Instagram throws a warning/information dialog, saying that it needs access to the Camera Roll, you can enable it from Settings -> Privacy -> Photos and turn ON the toggle for Instagram.

InstaSave is available on the BigBoss repo for free.

A quick video on how to use InstaSave to save Instagram photos to Camera Roll: