Event hashtag on Instagram: how to collect every post from your event

An Instagram event hashtag pays off only if you collect the posts soon after the event, while they are still near the top of the tag's recent feed. Choose a short tag nobody else uses, put it everywhere attendees look, and within a few days of the event pull every public post from the event window into a spreadsheet. That sheet becomes your recap, your thank-you list and your pool of photos to ask permission for. This guide walks the whole job for a conference, a festival, a launch party, a meetup or a wedding: before, during and after.

What an event hashtag is for

An event hashtag is a shared label. Each attendee who posts with it adds their photo to one public page, so the event is visible as a whole instead of scattered across hundreds of personal accounts. Organisers use the posts for:

• The recap. A post, a newsletter or a sponsor report showing the event through attendees' eyes.
• Thanking people. A list of everyone who posted, so you can reply, reshare or follow up.
• Next year's marketing. Real photos from real guests, used with their permission.
• Measuring the day. How many people posted, when the activity peaked, which sessions or moments drew the most posts.

All four depend on the same thing: a complete list of the posts. The hashtag page on Instagram is a feed you scroll. It does not give you a list.

Before the event: choose the tag

The tag is your collection bin, so it should hold only your event's posts.

1. Search it on Instagram first. If strangers already use it, pick another. Sorting their posts out of yours is the most tedious part of any recap.
2. Make it specific. Add the year or the city: #brightconf2026 rather than #brightconf, #ana_and_sam_wed rather than #wedding. A generic tag collects the whole internet.
3. Keep it short and spellable. People type it on a phone, often in a hurry. Every typo is a post on a different hashtag.
4. Use one tag. Two official tags split the posts in half and double the work afterwards.
5. Test it. Post one photo from a staff account and check that it shows on the tag's page.

The free hashtag checker reads a tag's recent posts and shows how busy it already is, which is a quick way to confirm a candidate tag is empty before you print it on anything.

During the event: get the tag into every post

A tag nobody sees is a tag nobody uses. Put it where people already look when they reach for their phone:

Ask for feed posts and Reels, and say so. Many people post Stories at events. Stories disappear after a day and do not show on hashtag pages in a way you can collect later, so a guest who only posts a Story leaves nothing for your recap.

Remind people that private accounts are invisible. Posts from private profiles never appear on hashtag pages. You cannot collect what Instagram does not show, so mention it on the photo wall if a complete record matters to you.

After the event: collect the posts

This is where the event hashtag earns its keep, and timing matters more than method.

Collect within a few days. A hashtag's recent feed is newest first. Each new post pushes your event further down, and on a busy tag the event day is soon buried. The longer you wait, the further any tool has to scroll to reach it.

The manual way

For a small event, the app is enough:

1. Open the event hashtag and switch to the most recent posts.
2. For each post, copy the link, the username and the date into a sheet.
3. Keep scrolling until you pass posts from before the event started.
4. Check again a day later, because some guests post their photos after they get home.

Copy the link and username as you go. A screenshot without them is a photo you cannot credit, thank or ask permission for.

When the manual way is enough

Scrolling by hand works when:

• the event is small enough for a few dozen posts;
• one person runs the recap and nobody needs to check the list;
• you only want a handful of photos and do not need a count.

It stops working at a conference with hundreds of attendees, at a festival that runs over several days, or when a sponsor wants numbers.

Collect the event as a spreadsheet

The faster way replaces the scrolling with a download. The Instagram Hashtag Scraper reads one hashtag and writes its posts to a dataset, one row per post, newest first. An event has a start and an end, and the scraper has a date window built for that:

1. Set Hashtag to the event tag, without the #.
2. Set Only posts newer than to the moment doors opened, for example 2026-10-03T08:00:00Z.
3. Set Only posts older than to a day or two after the event ends, so late posts from the drive home are included.
4. Set Maximum posts above the number you expect. The limit is exact, so the run never delivers more than you asked for.
5. Paste the session cookie of an Instagram account you control. Instagram only serves hashtag posts to signed-in requests, and the step-by-step scraping guide shows where to find the cookie.
6. Run it, then export the dataset as CSV or Excel.

The run stops when the feed reaches your start time, so nothing from before the event is read. If the tag has been busy since the event, raise Maximum feed pages (the default is 50) so the run can reach back far enough. It charges $0.0005 per post delivered to your dataset, so an event with 1,000 posts costs $0.50 to collect, and a run that finds nothing costs nothing. Deduplication happens within a run, so a second run over the same window charges for the same posts again.

Post times are in UTC. Convert your local start time before you type it in, or you will cut off the first hour of the day or pull in the evening before.

What to do with the spreadsheet

Each row carries the fields a recap needs:

A few things you can work out in a few minutes:

• How many people posted. Remove your own accounts, then count the distinct values in ownerUsername.
• When activity peaked. Round takenAt to the hour and count posts per hour. The peak usually lines up with the keynote, the headline act or the first dance.
• Which moments people shared. Search the caption column for session names, speakers or sponsors.
• The most liked posts. Sort by likeCount, but treat a blank count as unknown rather than zero, since Instagram hides counts on some posts.

The Excel export guide covers opening the dataset cleanly, and the hashtag performance guide shows how to turn rows like these into a chart.

Hand collection against a spreadsheet

What an event hashtag cannot capture

Plan around these so the gaps do not surprise you:

• Stories. They are the most common way guests post at events, and they do not appear on hashtag feeds in a form that can be collected.
• Private accounts. Their posts never show on a hashtag page.
• Posts without the tag. A great photo posted without your hashtag, or with a typo, is on a different page. You can collect a common misspelling as a second run.
• Comments. The scraper returns posts, not the conversation under them.
• Old events. Reaching a date far in the past means walking the whole feed back to it, and on a busy tag the run will hit its page budget first. Collect while the event is recent.

The limits page lists every boundary, and the output page shows a full sample row.

Before you reuse anyone's photo

A post under your event hashtag is public, but using the tag is not permission to appear in your ads or on your website. Ask each person before you reuse their photo, and keep a record of the yes. The guide to collecting user generated content on Instagram covers how to ask and how to record the answer. If you ran a photo competition at the event, the hashtag contest guide covers rules and picking a winner.

The short version

An Instagram event hashtag works when the tag is unique, short and visible everywhere on the day, and when you collect the posts within a few days of the event. Scroll the tag by hand for a small gathering. For a conference, a festival or anything a sponsor will ask about, run the scraper with the event's start and end times and build your recap from one sheet.