Developer Tool
Instagram media IDs embed a creation timestamp using a custom epoch starting January 1, 2011 — paste a numeric media ID to decode it.
The numeric media ID, not the short alphanumeric "shortcode" seen in post URLs — those need converting to numeric form first.
An Instagram media ID's top 41 bits hold a millisecond timestamp offset from a custom epoch of January 1, 2011 (Instagram's own reference point, chosen around when the ID scheme was designed) — not 1970 like Unix time, and not a plain seconds count like TikTok's. The remaining lower bits encode a shard/server ID and a per-shard sequence number, following a Twitter-Snowflake-inspired design Instagram's engineering team documented publicly.
The short string visible in a normal Instagram post URL (like CqZ8x9BJ3aF) is a base64-style encoding of the same underlying numeric ID, not something separate — but it needs to be decoded back to the numeric form first before this tool's math applies. This tool expects that already-decoded numeric ID directly.
Related
A similar embedded-timestamp ID, with a simpler Unix-epoch structure.
The Discord/Twitter format Instagram's scheme was inspired by.
A completely different database-generated ID with its own embedded timestamp.