It’s that time of year, the countdown to midnight and to a fresh start as we turn a page on the calendar and prepare to begin anew — celebrating a look back at the year that was and anticipating all the change, milestone and perfect moments to come in the year ahead. As part of that look back, if you like many Instagram users find yourself in a particularly reflective mood and want to take stock of your journey over the past year, there’s a simple collage-driven bandwagon you can hop on and subject all your followers on the Facebook-owned photo-sharing service to.
That’s right, it’s once again the season the “Top 9” posts on Instagram, which are essentially collages that offer a kind of “year in review” for users by collecting and showcasing their nine most popular posts from the year. If you’ve seen these collages and never tried to make your own before, you might not be aware that you can’t do this natively within the Instagram app itself. You have to rely on a third-party app, and here’s how to do it.
I visited London for the first time this year, and this is one of the accounts I follow below. The post with a grid of images should give you an idea of what users who make these “Top 9” collages are going for. It’s a nice, quickly-scannable way for users who “drive by” your account in the feed to get a sense of what all you’ve done this year.
One of the most popular apps relied on to create this collage is Beta Labs’ Top Nine, which you can download for free from both the Google Play Store as well as the iOS App Store. All you need to do once you’ve downloaded it is enter your Instagram username and add your email address — the app will then pull your nine most-popular images from the year and present them as the now-familiar collage (by the way, almost 9.3 million such collages have been generated via Top Nine as of the time of this writing for 2019).
If you’re okay with making a $2.99 in-app purchase, you can remove the “Top Nine” stamp that’s visible over your collage. From there, you choose to either share the grid of images directly to Instagram or save it to your Photos library on your drive.
Again, while there are a variety of different apps you can use to do this same thing, Top Nine is one of the most popular. Have fun making these everyone, and best wishes for 2020.
