If you’re tired of having videos autoplay on your feed, then here’s a guide on how to disable autoplay videos on Instagram. This will only work when you’re on a cellular data connection.
When on WiFi, there’s no way to stop the autoplay of a video. It will keep looping on forever and ever until you scroll up or down. Ever since Instagram allowed posting of short 16 second videos, they have started to show up everywhere.
While some videos are good to watch, some can be very annoying. The worst part, they’ll autoplay themselves as soon as you enter the view.
Of course, you can just scroll up or down to stop the video from auto-playing, but the videos will still load and use up your bandwidth. When the videos feature first launched in 2013, there was an option that allowed users to disable loading of videos. That was later removed. As of now, no direct switch can be used to turn this feature off. Instead, you’re going to have to use a trick.
So if you’re someone who’s looking for a way to disable autoplay videos on Instagram, then you have to try this. Once again, this trick will only work while you’re using Instagram for a cellular connection. This is because you’re basically asking Instagram to lower your data usage, and that will stop the autoplay or loading of videos. This will work on both the iOS and Android app.
Here’s how to Disable Autoplay Videos on Instagram
- Launch Instagram and go to your Profile page.
- On iOS, tap the circular gear icon in the top right corner. Scroll down to Mobile Data Use and enable Use Less Data.
- On Android, go to your profile and click on the three vertical dots or Hamburger menu. Scroll down to Cellular Data Use and select Use Less Data.
- Instagram will now stop loading both pictures and videos while on a Cellular connection.
That’s about it. Yes, it’s not a straight cut method, but, at least, this way you have an option not to have Instagram pre-load the videos for you and use up your data.