Instagram Introduces A Private Archive Your Stories

In a move to make the platform more attractive to everyone, the ephemeral picture sharing app now has a new feature that will add your expired stories to a Private Archive starting from yesterday. We had reported this as part of features that we thought the Facebook owned company will be rolling out in future updates.

There is also an option for users to opt out at any time they desire to. The following is a statement by Instagram: “moving forward, your stories will automatically save to your archive when they expire. This makes it easy for you to revisit your favorite moments later on or bring them back to life in a highlight”.

To access the stories in your archive, you have to just tap the archive icon on your profile. And then from there switching between your Post Archives and your new Stories Archives becomes easy.  The first story from each day will show a date indicator to help you navigate your archive as you scroll.  You’d get a notification inside the app when the story archive is available to your account.

Tap on any story in your archive to watch it and then from there you can add it to your story, share it as a post or add it to a highlight on your profile. You can create as many highlights as you want.

Snapchat introduced a very similar feature back in 2016, suffice it to say that this is another feature copied by Instagram from Snapchat.

Also a new tool called Stories Highlights was also launched by Instagram together with the Private Archive. And according to Instagram, “Story highlights lets you show all the sides of your personality and you can make highlights out of anything you’ve shared to your story in the past”.

Due to the integration in Facebook which allows some Instagram posts to appear on Facebook, there is a work currently going on by both Facebook and Instagram to let you bring your Instagram contacts into Messenger.