Browsing Instagram photos online is simple and straightforward, but if you’d prefer local copies then that’s also easy to arrange, with just a little help from the open source InstagramSaver.

Download, unzip and launch the program and you’re presented with a clear and simple interface. At a minimum, all you have to do is enter an Instagram user name, click Download, and watch as InstagramSaver grabs all the photos from that account.

By default the images are saved into a Documents\InstagramSaver folder, although this can be customised. Once a download is complete, InstagramSaver opens an Explorer folder at that location, ready for you to explore.

Type Instagram user name. Click “Download”. It’s as easy as that.

What you won’t find initially are any videos, as they’re ignored, presumably to avoid hogging too much bandwidth. But if you’d like those as well, click Settings and check “Download videos too”.

The other plus point here is that InstagramSaver downloads files in parallel, by default opening up to 8 simultaneous connections. This won’t work for everyone, but fortunately the figure can be tweaked in Settings: increasing it may improve performance, while cutting it should reduce InstagramSaver’s bandwidth use.

There are one or two other small but welcome touches. An update checker alerts you to new releases, for example, and a change log keeps you up-to-date on any changes.

For the most part, though, InstagramSaver just works as you’d expect, quickly downloading photos and videos whenever it’s asked. Go take a look.