How To Delete Highlights On Instagram

It’s been said time and time again that social media usually only shows someone’s highlight reel. Even the most candid of photo dumps was curated from a not-so-glamorous camera roll, and even the most seemingly-spontaneous Instagram story was probably preceded by someone telling their friend, “Wait, do that again. I wanna take a video.” But few spheres of Instagram embody this best-of energy quite like one’s Instagram highlights. Often picked from the cream of the crop of one’s stories, Instagram highlights are a way for users to display a selection of their favorite stories on their profile. Many have even organized their stories into folders with aesthetically pleasing icons and titles like “travel photos,” “my besties,” etc. It’s very much a “best foot forward” way of giving new followers a glimpse of your best stories.

But, no matter how curated your Instagram highlights may be, there might come a time when they start to feel less like a highlight reel and more like your bloopers. Say, for instance, that highlight folder from you and your S/O’s vacation that now has aged like milk post-breakup.

If there’s a certain highlight folder you don’t want pinned to your profile for all to see, you’re not eternally tied to these selections. Here is everything you need to know about deleting Instagram highlights.

How To Delete Instagram Highlights

First, you’ll want to head to your profile tab on Instagram. Find the highlight reel you want to delete entirely, or delete individual stories from, and long-press on it.

If you want to delete an entire highlight folder, all you need to do next is press “Delete Highlight” from the pop-up menu. However, if there are certain stories from this highlight that you’re hoping to cut out of the selection, then click “Edit Highlight.” From here, you’ll be taken to a screen that shows the thumbnails of all of the stories in your highlights under a tab labeled “Selected.” Find the story, or multiple stories, that you wish to delete, and just tap on them to remove the check mark from their thumbnail. Press “Done” in the top right corner, and your updated highlight will reflect these changes.

If there are multiple highlight folders that you wish to delete, or multiple stories within separate highlight folders, then just rinse and repeat. Soon, your profile will be squeaky clean of any undesirable story highlights.

How To Restore An Instagram Highlight That You Deleted

If you accidentally deleted a highlight without meaning to — or, better yet, you and your S/O got back together and now you’re ready to re-launch that romantic vacation highlight — it’s pretty easy to restore a highlight.

If you want to restore a deleted story to your highlight, you can just add it back into your highlight folder in the same way you’d add a new story into the folder. To do this, hold down on the folder, click “Edit Highlight,” select “Stories” next to the default “Selected” tab, scroll back to the story, and select it. As long as you didn’t delete the story from your archive, you’ll be able to recover it to your highlight folder.

If you accidentally deleted an entire highlights folder, well, good luck, Charlie. Just kidding. The process for recovering this is still possibly, just slightly more grueling. Essentially, you will just need to recreate the entire folder like you would while creating a new highlight folder. To do so, click the “New” option with a plus (+) sign icon to the right of your highlight folders. Then, select the stories from your archive that you want to put in the highlight folder. Click “Next,” and type in your title and select your cover photo.

Phew. Just like new.