(Credit: Instagram)
Instagram has launched Instants, a new dedicated feature and app that lets you share photos that disappear after your close friends or mutual followers view them once.
Instants sounds a lot like Snapchat, but the major difference is that it lets you share only unedited, unfiltered photos taken with the in-app camera. The goal here is to make it “easier to share life’s moments with friends as they happen,” Instagram says in a blog post.
You can access Instants from the bottom-right of Instagram’s inbox. The feature appears like a stack of photos. Once you click a picture, you can add a caption and share it with either your Close Friends or followers you follow back. You can't upload photos from your camera roll.
(Credit: Instagram)There’s an Undo button if you need to unsend the photo before it's viewed. Every photo will be available for 24 hours, after which it will vanish. In any case, your friends won’t be able to take screenshots.
Instants shared by your friends will get stacked up at the same spot in your DMs. You can then send reactions and replies to these images.
(Credit: Instagram)Like Stories, Instants will get saved in a private archive that only you can access. You can then create a Recap of your Instants and share them as Stories. In case you don’t like the feature, you can hold down the stack in DMs and swipe right to snooze Instants.
(Credit: Instagram)The feature is also available for Teen Accounts, but with some restrictions. Time spent on Instants will count toward a teen’s daily time limit, and parents of supervised teens will be notified when their kids download the Instants app. Additionally, notifications for teen accounts will remain muted between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. by default.
Instants is rolling out to Instagram users worldwide; we don't see it in the iOS app yet.
The dedicated Instants app, meanwhile, will be limited to select countries that Meta has yet to specify. In April, Meta began testing the dedicated Instants app in Italy and Spain. Wherever available, users can log in to the new app using their Instagram account.