If you’ve haven’t seen this in your Instagram feed already, just wait. It’s coming. The arrival of a new year means so many things. Turning a page on the calendar, the compilation of resolutions for the year ahead, endless lists about the “best of” this or that from 2018 — and tons of collages. Specifically, those perennial collages of nine Instagram posts that users of the Facebook-owned service create and share around this time each year. The collages represent the best (i.e., most-liked) nine images a user posted on Insta over the prior year, and this is how to create one for yourself, assuming you don’t already know how.
You’ve actually got a few options. One of the more popular involves visiting this site — https://topnine.co/ — and entering your Instagram username to get started. As an aside, one way to gauge how popular this is is by checking out the counter on that site showing how many of these 2018 collages have been made by visitors to the page. More than 4.1 million at the time of this writing, and counting.
Instead of visiting the Top Nine site, you can also do this via the Top Nine mobile app, instead. Speaking of the app — if your Instagram account is set to private, you’ll need to do all this on the app instead of the website, and you can of course get the app on the Google Play Store as well as the iOS App Store.
At any rate, the idea here is pretty straightforward and announced right there on the webpage: “Life is all about experiences. Rediscover your best nine Instagram moments from 2018 and share them with your friends.”
The service will look at your account and assemble your nine most-liked images into a single-gridded image that you can likewise post to your Instagram account. This year, you’ve got to also provide an email address to Top Nine – that’s where they’ll send you your results, once they’re ready.
The finished results look like. Let’s just take, oh, to be completely random — how about a totally average Instagram user like Beyonce:
There are also alternatives to Top Nine, in case you’d prefer a different choice. Check out “Best Grid for Instagram” and “Best 9 for Instagram,” to name a few. Also, you always have the option to use something like Instagram’s own Layout app to just create a collage of any nine of your posts for the year. A manual option like this just won’t automatically sort through to find your most-liked posts.
