Editorial policy

This site publishes two kinds of writing: documentation of a tool we built, and guides to features of Meta's products. The standards differ, so both are described separately below, along with what we get wrong and how to tell us.

What we speak to from direct experience

The downloader is ours. Everything on this site about how Threads and Instagram actually deliver media comes from building and maintaining the code that reads it, not from reading other people's articles. Three examples of what that means in practice, because "we have experience" is worth nothing as an assertion:

• Photos are described as JPEG because the bytes are JPEG.Threads stores uploads as HEIC and its URLs still end .heic, but the same URLs carry a conversion instruction and the CDN converts on delivery. We know because the proxy reads the responseContent-Type and names files from it.
• Rendition sizes were checked against the files themselves.Instagram sends some carousel photos with no stated dimensions, so sizes are derived from the CDN's transform parameters. Those derivations were verified against the dimensions written in the delivered JPEG's own frame header — fourteen candidates, all fourteen matching — rather than assumed correct.
• Claims about extraction reliability come from testing every method. The resolver tries several independent ways to fetch a post. Each one is exercised separately against live posts, because an end-to-end test passing only proves that one of them works.

Where a technical claim on this site cannot be checked that way, it is not made. There are no benchmark numbers, no success-rate percentages and no "fastest downloader" claims, because none of those could be substantiated.

How guides about Meta's products are written

We do not control Threads or Instagram, so guides to their settings are reporting rather than documentation. The rules we hold ourselves to:

• Primary sources first. Product behaviour is checked against Meta's own material — the Instagram Help Centre and Meta's newsroom — and linked so you can check it yourself.
• Everything is dated. Menu paths move and features reach regions months apart. Each guide states the month it describes and says so on the page, rather than implying a screenshot is permanent.
• No invented statistics. If a number cannot be traced to a source worth citing, it is left out. This is not hypothetical: our guide to earning on Threads quotes no monthly earnings figures at all, because the figures circulating widely do not agree with each other and none trace back to Meta.
• Disagreement is reported, not resolved. Where sources conflict, the guide says they conflict instead of picking whichever is more convenient.
• Behaviour that changed is described as changed. Deleting a Threads profile once removed the Instagram account behind it and no longer does. Guides that quietly present only the current state leave readers unable to tell whether the advice they remember is stale.

Who writes this

Guides are published by ThreadsDownload rather than under individual bylines, and the organisation is accountable for them. We would rather attribute honestly to the publisher than attach an invented author with invented credentials, which is a common enough practice on sites in this category to be worth stating we do not do it.

There are currently 6 guides. Each carries its publication date, its last-updated date, and a link back to this page.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and a specific report is far more useful than a general one. Email hello@threadsdownload.org with the page and the claim you are disputing.

How corrections are handled:

• Factual errors are fixed in place and the last-updated date changes, so the page's own timestamp reflects the edit.
• Substantive corrections are noted on the page rather than silently overwritten, where the original claim could have led someone to act on it.
• Routine staleness is not annotated. When Meta moves a menu and we update a step, the date moves and that is all — annotating every product change would bury the corrections that matter.

Funding and independence

Verifiable from the site itself, and from the source it is built from:

• No advertising. No ad slots, no ad network, no ad pixels.
• No affiliate links. Nothing on this site earns a commission when you click it. Where a guide recommends a tool or a route, there is no financial interest behind the recommendation.
• No sponsored or paid placement. No article, mention or link here has been paid for, and we do not sell any.
• No analytics and no trackers. No third-party scripts of any kind. The only value written to your browser is your light or dark theme preference, which never leaves your device.
• No accounts and no data collection. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no user data to monetise. The privacy policy lists everything that is retained.

If any of that changes — if the site ever carries advertising or affiliate links — it will be disclosed on this page and labelled where it appears, before it appears.

What we cannot promise

Stating the limits is part of being trustworthy about the rest:

• Meta changes things without notice. A guide accurate on the day it was written can be wrong a month later. The dates on each page are there so you can judge how much to trust them.
• We are not affiliated with Meta. Nothing here is official documentation, and we have no channel to Meta for confirmation beyond what they publish.
• This is not legal advice. Guides describe copyright in general terms because the topic is unavoidable when discussing downloads. A specific situation needs a lawyer, not a download page.
• Translated pages are machine-assisted. The localised pages are written translations rather than raw machine output, but they have not all been reviewed by native speakers. Corrections to any of them are welcome at the address above.