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Want to post on Instagram without it being publicly available? Whether you want to protect your privacy or curate your brand presence, there are a few options for posting silently, depending on your specific needs. Let's take a look...
Make Your Profile Private
If you want to keep your posts from the public eye you can set your profile to private. This way, only users who you accept follower requests will be able to see your posts - and you can still create Close Friends lists, archive posts, and make any other settings changes as usual for further privacy.
Open the Instagram mobile app and visit your profile page.
Tap the three lines on the top right corner.
Scroll down to Who Can See Your Content and tap Account Privacy.
Toggle Private Account ON.
Create A Close Friends List
If you'd like to curate your audience even further, or if you'd rather not set your entire account to private, you can create a Close Friends list, and choose your Close Friends as your audience when creating posts or publishing Stories.
Open the Instagram mobile app and visit your profile page.
Tap the three lines on the top right corner.
Scroll down to Who Can See Your Content and tap Close Friends.
Select the accounts you wish to add to your Close Friends list and click DONE.
How To Share With Close Friends
To share a post with just your Close Friends, create a post as usual.
When you get to the final step before sharing, scroll down and tap Audience.
Change Audience to Close Friends.
NOTE: If you have crossposting on - for example, to a Facebook page - you will not be able to change the Audience of your post but you will still be able to share Stories with Close Friends.
Archive Posts
Want to hide a post that you've already shared?
Open Instagram and access the posted content from your profile feed.
Tap the three dots on the top right corner and select Archive.
How To Access Your Archive
Open Instagram and access your profile.
Tap the three lines on the top right corner.
Tap Archive to see all photos or Story posts that you've hidden from public view.
To Unarchive a post, tap it to open it, then tap the three dots on the top right corner.
Tap Show On Profile.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you rearrange the order of posts on your Instagram feed by archiving/unarchiving?
No - when you archive and unarchive a post it will appear in the same order that it was originally posted in.
How can you share a post that only you can see on Instagram?
The only way to set your audience to just yourself on Instagram would be to create a separate personal account, and add this account to your Close Friends list. Then you could share posts with Close Friends and only the account you added to this list would be able to view it.
