- Instagram updated its Stories feature on Tuesday.
- The app will now automatically save users' Stories to their archive page.
- A new Highlights area will allow users to tout particular Stories on their profile pages.
Instagram is ramping up its battle with Snapchat.
Facebook's photo sharing app on Tuesday added two new capabilities to its Stories feature, one a direct copy of a recent feature in Snap. With the new capabilities, Instagram users will be able to more easily keep and continue to display their older Stories.
One of the updates is a feature that will automatically archive users' Stories after they expire. Previously, you could only use the archive feature to manually save photo and video posts, but not Stories.
You can access your Stories archive in the same way as your archived posts - by tapping on the clock icon in the upper-right hand corner of your profile page. On your archive page, you can switch between Stories and posts by tapping the arrow beside the word "Archive" at the top of the screen.
The other Instagram update is related to its new Stories archive. Users can now take Stories they've archived and add them to a highlights section at the top of their profile page. To add a profile highlight, you tap the circle on the top left of your profile page.
It's been particular successful with its Stories feature. In April, just months after launching the feature, Instagram Stories hit 200 million active daily users, surpassing the 158 million active daily users Snap had overall at the time.
The ability to add Stories to Highlights is likely to appeal to younger Instagram users, many of whom pay lots of attention to their digital personas and go to great lengths to develop their personal brands. Many younger users spend hours carefully curating the photos they have on their profile pages. The Highlighted stories feature will offer them another way to personalize their pages.
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