Instagram introduces new daily photo collection feature

New feature allows users to share all photos during their day

A series of handout screen grabs show Instagram’s new Stories feature, a close copy of Snapchat’s.
A series of handout screen grabs show Instagram’s new Stories feature, a close copy of Snapchat’s.

Instagram has just unveiled its latest feature - a daily collection of photographs that will disappear after 24 hours from your feed.

Instagram Stories is rolling out to users on both iOS and Android from Tuesday, and willl continue over the next few weeks.

In a post on the Instagram blog, the company said the feature would allow users to share all the moments of their day rather than just the photographs they wanted to stay on their profile. Stories can include both video and still images, and are shared as a slideshow with as many or as few people as the profile owner likes. The images can be annotated too, with text and drawing tools.

There are no public likes or comments either, with all reactions shown only to the story owner.

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Snapchat rival

It's another step towards Snapchat-style sharing for Instagram and its parent company Facebook as the companies try to adapt to the needs of younger users. Messenger is currently trialling a secret conversations feature that will allow messages to be read only on one device, and can be set to disappear after a certain period of time.

Instagram Stories bears more than a striking resemblance to Snap’s Stories feature, which allows users to post photographs in a collection that lasts 24 hours, including video, and has various customisation features, such as text and drawing tools.

Snapchat is becoming ever more popular with the 18-34 age group, which could be bad news for Facebook and Instagram.

However, Facebook’s latest results indicated the social network was still growing, notching up 1.71 billion monthly active users. Instagram currently has 500 million active users, with 300 million using the site every day.

Ciara O'Brien

Ciara O'Brien

Ciara O'Brien is an Irish Times business and technology journalist