How to get your Instagram Top 9

Yes, you can technically turn off your Instagram likes – but isn't it just more fun to know exactly how many likes your photos get?

If you want to bask in the vanity of your Instagram's best-performing posts, you can get a neat little report of your top nine most liked posts, delivered in an aesthetically pleasing square collage.

Usually it’s customary to check on your best posts at the end of the year, but we say why not do it whenever you want? In the olden days, people used to screenshot this report and post it to their actual grids. These days, that’s unheard of, but there's no shame in posting your Top Nine to Instagram Stories. Here’s how you can get in on the action.

1. Pick a website

There are two main services that’ll pull your nine most-liked posts together for you: Top Nine and Best Nine. They’re very similar to each other, but there are a couple of key differences.

Top Nine functions as both a website and an app. If you choose the app route, you can actually opt out of handing over your email address in the process, whereas the desktop version doesn't allow this. It can also search both private and public accounts. Best Nine doesn’t ask for an email at all, but it does seem to run quite a bit slower than Top Nine, and it can only search public accounts. Both promise not to sell your data to any third parties within their privacy policies.

2. Input your handle

Like I mentioned earlier, the different apps will ask for different things, but your handle is essential information. Earlier in 2021, we found Top Nine was rerouting us to the 2020 edition (now part of CreatorKit, which houses video and design tools for social media) from the main website if you’re using the browser version, but as of the end of December, it seems to be working better. Still, make sure you’re in the right place — especially if your 2020 and 2021 top posts are all an unnervingly similar mix of your cat, your baking projects, and masked selfies.

3. Literally just wait

The sites will do the work for you, it’s just a matter of how long you want to wait. Top Nine’s browser version told me to download the app for the process to take just "seconds, rather than minutes," but since I gave it my email, it actually also emailed my top nine to me upon completion, so I didn’t have to sit on the site.

Best Nine’s disclaimer warned me it could take up to 10 minutes, but from personal experience, it seems to take even longer. I have no patience, so I will personally be skedaddling right on over to Top Nine.

4. Brag

Obviously, we’re not just doing this to gather metrics. We’re doing this to show off. Top Nine’s built-in share button will generate rectangular Instagram Story and square regular post templates for you featuring your personal top nine, which is really nice for aesthetic purposes. It’s easy to save to your Camera Roll and upload via Instagram the way you normally would.

Ooooh, pretty! Credit: screenshot: top nine

Best Nine generates a basic square image that you can download to your device. Neither Best Nine or Top Nine's images are watermarked, if that's something that tends to bother you.

If all else fails, just take a screenshot. You can jazz it up on your Instagram Story however you like, and your followers will surely be impressed by the same posts they already saw the first time you posted them.

But hey, we all deserve some innocent, vain fun. Bring on the Instagram top nines!

This story was originally published in December 2020 and updated in July and December 2021.