Instagram is taking another stab at the ephemeral photo format with a new feature called Instants. It’s available in the main Instagram app as well as in a new dedicated app, which is also called Instants.
The idea here is to snap and share photos spontaneously. Kinda like how Instagram used to be way back in the day before it became influencer central. These photos disappear after your friends — who can react and reply to the images — see them. They’ll stay in your archive for up to a year and you can share them as stories later by compiling them as a recap.
In the main Instagram app, you can access Instants from your DM inbox by tapping on the photo stack in the bottom right corner. The only way you can modify Instants is by adding a caption. There are no editing tools or filters here. You can’t upload photos from your camera roll either.
You can then choose who you want to share one of these photos with (either close friends or mutuals) and then send them. There’s an undo button that gives you a moment to change your mind and remove an Instant before your friends see it.
When it comes to your friends’ Instants, you can snooze them by holding the icon in your inbox and swapping right. Swipe the other way to start seeing them again.
As for the dedicated Instants app, Instagram says it’s been experimenting with that in certain countries on iOS and Android. “We’ve been testing instants for a while, and one thing we heard was that people wanted a quicker, easier way to get into the camera,” the company said in a blog post. That’s almost an admission that the main Instagram app is way too bloated. (It absolutely is.)
The Instants feature and app also use all of Instagram’s normal safety and privacy protections, including blocking and muting other users. Parental supervisions for teen accounts on Instagram proper are automatically applied to Instants, including shared time limits, safety tools (such as a block on screenshots and screen recordings) and restricted access by default between 10PM and 7AM. A parent of a teen with a supervised account will get a notification when the latter downloads the Instants app.
This is hardly the first time that Instagram has taken on the likes of Snapchat (which it did incredibly successfully with stories) and BeReal. In 2014, it deployed an app called Bolt that was about quickly sharing photos with friends. Four years ago, Instagram released a BeReal clone called Candid Stories.
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