How To See Your Old Instagram Bios

If you’re on a never-ending mission to pick an Instagram bio that you can stick with for more than a few months, you likely have a pretty dense backlog of tag lines, ranging from LinkedIn-serious, to emoji-playful. And while your followers might not notice or remember all of the updates you’ve made to your internet personality, Instagram did. And if you want to take that cringey stroll down memory lane, there *is* a way to see all of your old Instagram bios. Yes, the app saves them in case you forget that time you identified as a “Proud cat mom” or “INFJ” or tagged your then-partner, now ex, in lieu of a biography.

To relive all of the horrors of your IG youth, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with how to see your old Instagram bios, which is just a matter of exploring your saved data and unearthing a world of embarrassment.

To access these settings, tap your photo thumbnail on the bottom right corner of your screen. On your profile page, tap the menu bar on the upper right hand corner. There, at the top of the list, you’ll find “Settings” — tap that. Next, click on the "Security" option (on Desktop, it's "Privacy and Security"). Then, choose "Access Data” under Data and History. On mobile, tap to open the page in Safari.

Here’s where you’ll find all of the old treasures of Instagram past. You can click "Former bio texts" to see every version of your bio that's existed to date. You can also click on "Former usernames," "Former full names," and "Former links in bio."

While this feature is a great tool for nostalgia, let it also be a reminder that Instagram holds onto a lot of data. You can download this data, to keep it for your records, but you can’t actually delete it. So let your ghosts of Instagram bios past remind you not to share anything with the app that you aren’t comfortable with it holding onto forever.