How to See Posts You Liked on Instagram in 2026

The path moved. As of September 2026: open your profile, tap the menu top right, then Settings, then “Your activity”, then “Interactions”, then “Likes”. Instagram shows your 300 most recent liked posts, sortable by date and by account, with a Select button to unlike several at once. Past 300, only the data download gives you the full list. And no, you cannot see anyone else’s likes since the Activity tab went away in 2019. If you want more reactions on your own posts, look at our Instagram likes.

Where your likes live in 2026

If you have been hunting for this list for ten minutes, it is not you. Instagram moved the feature twice in three years, first when the Accounts Center arrived across Meta apps, then when the whole history was folded into a single activity hub. Half the tutorials online still describe the old route, the one with a standalone “Posts you’ve liked” entry. That entry is gone.

Here is the exact route on a phone.

1. Open your profile by tapping your picture in the bottom right corner.
2. Tap the menu, the three lines in the top right, then Settings.
3. Scroll to “Your activity”. This is the activity hub, and it holds everything you have done on the account.
4. Open “Interactions”, then “Likes”.

The grid loads with your most recently liked post in the top left. Tap a thumbnail to reopen the original post, with its author, caption and comments.

On desktop the route is shorter: click “More” at the bottom of the left column, then “Your activity”, then “Interactions” and “Likes”. The web version shows the same list as the app, with the same limits.

@simplealpaca

The walkthrough on video, from the profile screen to the liked posts grid.

♬ original sound – Simple Alpaca – Simple Alpaca

One detail that wastes time: if you run several accounts, the history you see belongs to whichever account was active when you opened the menu. Switch first, or you will search the wrong list.

How far back the history goes

Almost no guide mentions this, and it is exactly what disappoints most readers. Instagram keeps your 300 most recent likes on screen. Not 300 a month, not 300 a year: 300 in total, newest first.

In practice, a quiet account can reach back two or three years. An account that likes ten posts a day burns through the quota in a month. The list behaves like a stack: every new like pushes the oldest one off the screen, and off it stays.

Two more rules apply. A post deleted by its author vanishes from your list, because there is nothing left to display. An account that switched to private, or that blocked you, produces the same effect: the thumbnail quietly disappears. That is not a bug, it is what happens when a history stores nothing but shortcuts to content owned by other people.

So if you are chasing something you liked years ago, do not scroll for twenty minutes. Skip straight to the data export described below, which does go back to the day you opened the account.

Sorting by date and by account

At the top of the grid sits the “Sort and filter” button, badly underused for something that changes the whole experience.

Sorting by date offers two orders, newest to oldest or the reverse. Flipping the order is the fastest way to see the oldest entries still present, which also tells you how far your history actually reaches.

The date range filter opens a calendar with shortcuts for the past week and the past month, plus custom start and end dates. Use it when you roughly remember when you saw the post.

The author filter lists the accounts present in your history and lets you tick one or several. You remember the creator but not the post? Three taps and the grid holds nothing else.

A content type filter finally separates feed posts from Reels, handy when your history is mostly video. The filters stack: one account, one month, Reels only. That combination usually finds anything in under a minute, provided the item is still inside the 300.

Unliking several posts at once

Good news: you no longer have to reopen each post to take a like back. From the same screen, tap “Select” in the top right, tick the thumbnails, then confirm with “Unlike”. They all go at once, and nobody gets a notification when a like is withdrawn.

Instagram does cap how many thumbnails a single selection accepts, around twenty five depending on the app version. A proper clear-out therefore means repeating the operation. It is tedious, and it is also a safeguard: firing off several hundred unlikes in a few minutes looks, to the anti-abuse systems, exactly like a script. The usual penalty is a temporary block on the action for a few hours. Spread the work out and nothing happens.

Be wary of apps promising to wipe every like in one click. They ask for your Instagram credentials, run from their own servers, and trigger precisely the signal the platform watches for. The classic ending is a logged-out account, sometimes used to send spam, sometimes lost for good. No amount of saved time is worth that.

Seeing what someone else liked

It is not possible. No hidden setting unlocks it, and nothing suggests that will change.

Until 2019, Instagram had an Activity tab with a “Following” section showing, in real time, the likes, comments and new follows of every account you followed. The platform removed it in October 2019. The official reasoning had two parts: very few people used it, and many users had no idea their activity was on display. Nothing equivalent has come back since.

What remains visible today is narrow. On a given post, the list of accounts that liked it can be opened if the author has not hidden the counter and the profiles are public. So you can check whether one specific person liked one specific post, assuming you find it. The reverse, starting from a profile and pulling up its likes, no longer exists.

Sites and apps claiming otherwise are selling nothing. No public Meta interface exposes that data, so nobody can reach it legitimately, whatever the price tag. Those services harvest credentials, display invented results, and end up billing a subscription that is hard to cancel. If you want to know what interests someone, read their public comments and shares, the only trace they genuinely leave.

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What you can still see about likes on a post, and what disappeared.

♬ original sound – Simple Alpaca

Your own likes are not invisible, mind you. A professional account sees how many likes it received and, post by post, which accounts reacted. Reach hinges on that signal: the faster a post collects reactions, the wider it travels. That is the whole logic behind our Instagram followers.

Liked, commented, saved: three separate lists

Liked posts are the ones whose heart you tapped. They live in “Your activity” under Interactions, and the author was notified the moment you tapped.

Liked comments form a separate list inside the same Interactions section. When you like somebody’s comment under a post, the entry does not join your liked posts, it goes with the comments. Plenty of people spend a quarter of an hour hunting for a post they never liked: it was the comment they approved of.

Saved posts are something else entirely. The bookmark under a post files it in a private space reachable from your profile, menu then “Saved”, with themed collections if you want them. Nobody is notified, and saving does not count as a reaction. It is the right tool for keeping an idea handy, precisely because it says nothing to the author.

One sentence to remember it: the heart is public and signals interest, the bookmark is private and serves your memory. If your goal is collecting inspiration, stop liking and start saving, and your like history will stay readable. And if you run an account, written reactions carry more weight than hearts, which is why people ask us for Instagram comments.

Getting the complete list through the export

The 300 ceiling disappears the moment you request your information. Meta is obliged to hand your data back, and that export contains every like you have ever given since the account was created.

1. In Settings, open the Accounts Center at the top of the screen.
2. Go to “Your information and permissions”, then “Download your information”.
3. Request a download, pick the account, choose “Some of your information” and tick the likes section.
4. Set the range to “All time” and pick a format: HTML to browse the result in a browser, JSON to work on it in a spreadsheet.
5. Confirm. The link arrives by email, usually within a few hours, sometimes a day or two on an old account.

Inside the archive, look for the likes folder: one file lists liked posts, another lists liked comments. Every line carries the account name, a timestamp and a direct link to the post. In HTML everything is clickable. In JSON, a spreadsheet lets you sort by author or by year and count, in thirty seconds, how many hearts you handed one account since 2018.

The export has a more serious benefit too: it shows you precisely what the platform keeps about your activity. A lot of people clean up their likes right after reading it, which is the best possible use of the file.