Another day, another Instagram feature that has been borrowed from rival Snapchat. The Facebook-owned photo sharing app on Tuesday debuted Archive, which lets users move posts that have been previously shared to a private archive.
As Instagram explains, the archive feature lets users move any photo or video off their profiles. Instead of having to delete the shared post, the user can place it in an archive private from followers.
When a user taps on a post in his or her profile, he or she will have the ability to choose to archive a post, along with editing or deleting a post. Users will also now see an archive button on the top right corner of the profile window, where they can access any archived photos and videos. Users can also move an archived posts back into their profiles. Instagram was previously testing the archive feature with a small number of users.
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The archive feature is similar to Snapchat’s Memories, which was launched in 2016 as a way to save videos and photos shared on Snapchat in a private archive. For Snapchat, the ability to save photos and videos in an archive was significant because all of these messages were previously ephemeral, meaning they disappeared after being seen.
For Instagram, the ability to archive gives its users the option of not deleting photos from their profiles. Many younger users, mainly teenagers, have been deleting Instagram posts if they don’t get enough likes or if they don’t like the photo or video.
Over the past year, Instagram has been adding new features to its app every few week. And many of these new features have been remarkably similar to those in Snapchat. Instagram CEO and founder Kevin Systrom, who sold the app to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, has even admitted that Snapchat deserved the credit for some of these new tools and features.
But more recently, Systrom said that copying is a natural response to competition. So it’s probably fair to assume that the copying won’t end anytime soon.
