I really wanted to export the square, over-filtered versions of my Instagram photos and I wanted the EXIF data intact. While attempting this, I found that, for some reason, Instagram deletes all of the EXIF data from these square, over-filtered photos. While the orignal rectangular and uncorrupted photos were saved on the phone, I *really* wanted the broken ones.  All of the utilities I tried exported low-resolution versions of the photos and reset the file creation date for each photo, which makes recreating the EXIF data very difficult.  Here’s how I got my photos out of Instagram and restored some of the EXIF data.

Frist, I coped the photo files directly from my phone via usb.  In the case of my Android phone, the files were stored in /Pictures/Instagram.

Next, I used ExifTool to recreate some of the EXIF data using the following: exiftool -v -P “-FileModifyDate>AllDates” “-Make=[phone make]” “-Model=[phone model]” [path]/[file(s)]

-v Verbose (level 1)

-P Preserves the file creation date for the new files

“-FileModifyDate>AllDates” Sets the EXIF date from the file creation date

“-Make=[phone make]” Sets the camera make

“-Model=[phone model]” Sets the camera model

The wildcard (*) cane be used to specify all files

Eg: exiftool -v -P “-FileModifyDate>AllDates” “-Make=Samsung” “-Model=i9100T” /Volumes/Data\ HD/Pictures/Clichéd\ Sunsets/*

Here’s the result.  The EXIF data isn’t complete, but it’s enough for my purposes.

More help from Stack Exchange: Is there any software which will set the EXIF Dates based on the file’s modification date?

Sunset yesterday.  Nice.