How to get Top Nine on Instagram: find and share your best posts of 2020 without watermark

The Top Nine trend on Instagram involves users sharing their most liked posts from the past 12 months

As 2020 draws to a close, many of our favourite social media platforms and services offer yearly roundups of our online habits, such as Spotify Unwrapped, Year on TikTok and Year in Monzo.

Another popular trend that pops up at the end of each year is the Instagram Top Nine, which sees Instagram users sharing a compilation of their most liked posts from the year.

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This is how to access and share your very own Instagram Top Nine so you don’t miss out on the action.

Are you taking part in the Instagram Top Nine trend? (Photo: Shutterstock)Are you taking part in the Instagram Top Nine trend? (Photo: Shutterstock)
Are you taking part in the Instagram Top Nine trend? (Photo: Shutterstock)

How to make your Instagram Top Nine

Despite the popularity of the trend, you can’t actually make your top nine within the Instagram app itself - you’ll need to employ the help of a third party app instead.

There are a number of different apps you can use to make your top nine post, but one of the most popular is one called Top Nine.

The Top Nine website claims it was the original app that started the Top Nine Instagram trend.

Top Nine is available for free on Android and iOS devices. Alternatively, you could use the website version if you don’t want to use up space on your phone by downloading an app.

To use Top Nine, you’ll be prompted to put in your Instagram handle, and also your email address. The app says, “Some accounts may take more than a couple of seconds to analyse. We will email your Top Nine so you don’t have to wait!”

After you’ve entered your information, the app will generate a photo collage of your nine most liked posts from 2020. It will also offer some insight into your accounts statistics over the past 12 months, including information like how many likes you got in total.

If you have a private Instagram account, you’ll need to download the Top Nine app and enter your Instagram email and password in order to grant the third party app access.

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Those with public accounts can use either the app or the website and only need to provide their Instagram handle.

How to get rid of the watermark

If you use the Top Nine website to generate your collage of your top posts, it will have a watermark over the top which reads Top Nine in an opaque font.

To get rid of the watermark, you have two options. Either pay a one time fee of $2.99 (£2.19) to remove it and click “save without watermark”.

Alternatively, there are a number of other apps available which allows users to generate their top nine collage without having to pay to remove the watermark.

Best Nine is another popular option, and allows users to save their top nine collage without a watermark for free.

Best Nine works a little slower than Top Nine, stating on its website that it “takes 10 minutes to complete your request due to a huge demand”.

How to share your collage

Once you’ve saved your top nine collage, either through Top Nine or Best Nine or any other available app, sharing it is simple.

To post to your story, head to the Instagram app and either swipe right on your feed, or tap the plus button next to your profile picture in the upper left hand corner.

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Open your gallery by tapping the bottom left thumbnail and choose your Top Nine generated collage.

From there, you can customise as you see fit, adding text, hashtags, stickers and gifs.

Can I see other peoples Top Nine posts?

Since all you need is an Instagram handle to see the Top Nine posts of public accounts, you can enter other handles into the Top Nine site.

For example, if you enter Outlander star Sam Heughan’s Instagram handle, you’ll be able to see his top nine most liked pictures. Top Nine reveals that he posted 318 pictures in 2020, received 39.5 million likes over the year, and gathered 124.2k likes per post.

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