Back in my day, if you posted a Story, your friends had to view it within 24 hours before it disappeared into the ether. But the era of the ephemeral Story as we know it may be drawing to a close. Instagram’s newest update brings with it one major change to the oh-so-popular feature: Stories that don’t expire.
The new feature is called Stories Highlights, and — for a company that’s gotten a lot of flack for, uh, “borrowing” a few key ideas from Snapchat — it’s actually pretty innovative. Instagram’s pitching it as a new way to “fully express your identity” (whatever that means) by adding a curated group of past Stories you’ve posted to your profile.
The feature can be accessed by clicking on the Stories Highlights section, which can be found in a new section of your profile below your bio. From there, you can choose which Stories you want to include in your Highlight from a list of past posts, select a cover for the Highlight, and give it a name. The Highlight will show up on your profile as a circle for other users to tap on and view. You can add as many Highlights as you want, and they’ll stay there basically till the end of time (or till you tap and hold on one to remove it).
Stories Highlights work by making use of another new feature: Stories Archive.
Think of it like Snapchat Memories, but with a different name and on Instagram. Stories Archive, well … archives your Stories. Yeah. Shocking, I know.
This is where Stories Highlights gets your past posts from, but the feature is also pretty useful for taking some nostalgic trips down memory lane. (If you’re into that sort of thing.) You can access all of your saved Stories by tapping the Archive button on your profile (which is where your regular archived posts are, too). All Stories are set to auto-archive from the get-go, but you can turn the feature off if you’d like by going to profile settings.
To access all of these new features, make sure you’re running the latest edition of Instagram, as they’re part of the new update. Happy ‘gramming.
