What's Inside the Instagram Data ZIP

You have the ZIP Instagram sent you, you open it, and you find a tangle of folders and cryptic file names. This guide explains what each one is, which you actually need, and a couple of details that make badly built tools fail without you noticing.

Where the part you want lives

Inside the ZIP, the only thing that matters for finding out who does not follow you back sits at this path:

connections/
  followers_and_following/
    followers_1.json
    following.json
    pending_follow_requests.json

If you requested only "Followers and following", that will be practically all there is. If you requested all of your information, that folder will be buried among many others (media, messages, ads_information...) and you will have to go looking.

What each file contains

Answering "who does not follow me back" needs only the first two. The third is an interesting extra: private accounts you asked to follow that have left you waiting, something that appears nowhere else in the app.

The detail that breaks tools: followers comes split

This is the point that causes the most trouble and that almost nobody warns you about. Once your follower list passes a certain size, Instagram does not produce a single followers_1.json: it splits the list across several numbered files.

followers_1.json
followers_2.json
followers_3.json

A tool that reads only followers_1.json will process part of your followers and silently ignore the rest. The result is disastrous and does not look like an error: it will tell you a crowd of people do not follow you back when in fact they do — they were simply in the second file.

If you are comparing by hand or in a spreadsheet, make sure you merge every followers_N.json before comparing. If you use a tool, check that the follower total it reports resembles the one on your profile: if it is far lower, it is reading only the first file.

What a record looks like inside

Opening any of those JSON files in a text editor shows something like this:

{
  "string_list_data": [
    {
      "href": "https://www.instagram.com/username",
      "value": "username",
      "timestamp": 1712345678
    }
  ]
}

The three fields mean:

• value: the username. This is the field compared between lists.
• href: the direct link to the profile, handy for opening it without searching.
• timestamp: when the relationship was established, in Unix format (seconds since 1970). The number in the example corresponds to April 2024.

That timestamp is more useful than it looks: it lets you sort the accounts you follow by age and see, for example, who you have been following for years without ever being followed back.

Two different formats, depending on when you asked

Instagram has changed the file structure over time, and both versions are out there. Older exports delivered a plain list of records. Current ones wrap that list in a key describing the relationship:

• relationships_followers in the followers file
• relationships_following in the following file
• relationships_follow_requests_sent in the pending requests file

It is a small difference to the eye, but enough to make a tool that understands only one of the two formats fail on the other. If you have ever tried an analyser that called your file "invalid" when it was perfectly fine, this is usually why.

What the export does not tell you

Worth being clear about before drawing conclusions: the export is a snapshot of the present moment. It contains who follows you now and who you follow now. It includes no history.

That means a single file cannot tell you who unfollowed you, however loudly some apps promise otherwise. What you can learn is who is not following you right now, which is a different question: some of those people never followed you at all.

To detect genuine unfollows you have to compare two exports from different dates. If that interests you, keep today's ZIP and request another in a month: the difference between the two is your real drop-off.

Doing the comparison

The logic is simple: every account that appears in following.json and appears in none of the followers_N.json files is not following you back.

With a handful of accounts a spreadsheet will do. Past a few hundred it becomes tedious and error-prone, mostly because of the split-file issue. Dropping the whole ZIP into NomeSigueApp gives you the list immediately, with the multiple files already accounted for. It asks for no username or password, and the analysis runs inside your browser, so the files never leave your device.

If you do not have the ZIP yet, start with the guide to requesting it in the right format; and if you requested it and it has not arrived, see how long it takes and what to check.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to unzip the file?

Not necessarily. Some tools read the ZIP directly. If you do unzip it, avoid third-party apps on a phone, since some of them alter the folder structure.

Can I open these files on a phone?

You can, though it is uncomfortable. A JSON file thousands of lines long does not read well on a small screen. To inspect it properly, use a computer.

Are the usernames in the file current?

They are the ones that existed when the export was generated. If somebody changes their username afterwards, you will see the old one. That is why it pays to analyse a recent file.

Is it safe to upload these files to a website?

That depends on the website. They contain your contact network, so this is not trivial information. The only way to be certain is using a tool that analyses inside your own browser and sends nothing to a server, which is how ours works.