How to Sort Instagram Hashtag Posts by Likes

Instagram gives every hashtag its own page, but it never lets you choose the order of what appears there. The grid is assembled by the algorithm, tuned to your account, and impossible to reorder. The workaround is a browser extension: with FeedRama installed in desktop Chrome, you can open any hashtag page on instagram.com and sort every post by likes, comments, views, shares, or date — turning the algorithm's mystery grid into a ranked list of what actually performs under that tag.

This guide walks through the exact steps, explains which sort metric answers which research question, and shows how to turn a sorted hashtag page into a usable content plan.

What Instagram's hashtag page actually shows you

Search a hashtag on Instagram and you land on a grid of "top" posts. Instagram has never published the recipe behind that grid, but it's clearly personalized: two people searching the same tag see different posts, ranked partly on what Instagram predicts each of them will engage with. There's no toggle to sort by likes, no visible engagement numbers on the grid, and the chronological Recent tab was retired years ago.

For casual browsing, that's fine. For research, it's a real problem. If you're deciding whether a hashtag is worth targeting — or reverse-engineering why certain posts dominate it — you need the tag's top posts measured in numbers, not an algorithm's opinion of your tastes.

Sort any hashtag page by likes, step by step

1. Install FeedRama. Add it free from the Chrome Web Store. It runs on instagram.com in desktop Chrome, and you don't need to create an account to start sorting.
2. Open the hashtag page. Type the tag into Instagram's search bar and click through to its page. Any public hashtag works.
3. Pick your metric. Open the FeedRama panel and choose likes. Comments, views, shares, and date are one click away if you want a different lens.
4. Set the range. On the free plan, each sort covers the previous 25 posts or the last week — enough to take a tag's temperature. Pro removes the cap so you can rank any time range you like.
5. Read the results. The grid reorders with the most-liked posts first. Click through the top handful and start taking notes.

Hashtag pages are just one surface, by the way. The same control sorts profiles, Reels, search results, the explore page, and your saved posts — so once a tag points you to a strong creator, you can sort their whole profile next. We covered that workflow in How to Sort Instagram Posts by Likes on Any Account.

Likes, comments, views, or date — which sort should you use?

Each metric answers a different question, and switching between them takes one click, so it's worth knowing what each one surfaces:

A useful trick: sort by likes first to establish the tag's ceiling, then re-sort by date to check whether recent posts still come anywhere near it. A tag whose best posts are all two years old is a tag in decline.

From sorted hashtag to content plan

Ranking the posts is the easy part — the value comes from what you do with the top ten. A simple routine that works:

• Look for repeated formats. If seven of the tag's ten most-liked posts are carousels with a bold text hook on slide one, that's not a coincidence — it's the format the audience rewards.
• Save the winners into a folder. FeedRama lets you bookmark posts into custom folders, so each hashtag you research becomes its own reference library instead of a pile of screenshots.
• Transcribe the top Reels. For video-heavy tags, run the best performers through FeedRama's Instagram transcription to study the first-line hooks word for word.

If you're using hashtags to hunt for ideas across a whole topic rather than one tag, the broader playbook in How to Find Viral TikTok Videos in Your Niche applies to Instagram almost unchanged.

What the free plan covers (and where Pro helps)

Sorting itself is free and unlimited — you can re-sort as many hashtags, profiles, and feeds as you want. The free limit is range: each sort looks at the previous 25 posts or the previous week. For a quick read on a tag, that's usually plenty. If you're doing deeper research — ranking a busy tag's last six months, say — Pro lifts the cap entirely for $10/month, or $5/month billed annually.

One honest caveat: FeedRama is a desktop Chrome extension. It doesn't run on phones or in Safari or Firefox, so hashtag sorting is a laptop workflow. If you mostly research on your phone, sorting via a filtered Instagram feed on desktop is still worth the occasional laptop session — it's dramatically faster than scroll-and-guess.

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