Instagram Unveils Stories: Photos That Disappear After 24 Hours

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Instagram just took a page from Snapchat’s book by announcing Instagram Stories, a new feature that lets you share temporary slideshows with multiple photos and videos.

The new feature is separate from your main Instagram timeline. Instead of worrying about overposting and flooding your friends and family with less-exciting moments, you can shoot as many photos and videos as you want over the course of a day and share those collections as a package. Text and drawings can be added to stories to further personalize them.

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Here’s how you draw on a Story:

The stories that you share will disappear after 24 hours and won’t show up in your main profile.

You can find the stories of people you follow by looking at the bar above your feed: when each user has a new story for you to view, a colorful ring will appear around their profile picture.

Tapping a profile photo will bring up their story. Unlike traditional posts on Instagram, you won’t be able to Like or Comment on stories.

When viewing your own story, you can swipe up to see who has viewed each of your photos and videos.

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This new feature is a huge change in how Instagram operates as a service, and makes Instagram even more of a direct competitor to Snapchat, which has been growing as a main rival in the photo-sharing space.

“Instagram has always been a place to share the moments you want to remember,” Instagram says. “Now you can share your highlights and everything in between, too.”

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The Instagram Stories feature will be rolling out to users over the next few weeks. Install the app update when it reaches you to get started with this feature.

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