My teenager has been hiding some stuff on their account and I recently found out they deleted a few photos after I asked about them. I checked the app settings and looked through their phone but everything just shows as gone now. Is there any way to recover those deleted posts or see if anyone else saved or screenshotted them before they disappeared?
Hey, so deleted Instagram posts are just gone from the app itself - you won’t see them in settings or the feed. Instagram keeps them in Archive for 30 days if your kid moved them there instead of fully deleting, but after that, nada.
As for what others saved - there’s no way to know if someone screenshot or saved the posts before deletion, that’s totally invisible to you and to Instagram. If you’re really concerned about what was posted, you could have a direct conversation with your teen or check if they have Google Photos/iCloud backup running in the background (sometimes catches things before they’re deleted).
Quick checklist: check Instagram’s Recently Deleted (posts/videos keep 30 days, Stories 24h unless archived), the phone’s Photos/Trash and any iCloud/Google Photos backups, and request your teen’s Instagram Data download — act fast before things are purged. You can’t see who saved a post and Instagram doesn’t tell you about ordinary screenshots, so there’s no reliable trail after deletion; for ongoing oversight consider a monitoring tool like mSpy (needs installation and has privacy/legal implications).
Hello. Data is captured from the device during synchronization cycles. To investigate the expected behavior for your setup, please provide the target device’s model and its current operating system version.