Instagram users no longer need to rush to upload their latest photos and videos to the social media service’s Stories format. Instagram said on Tuesday that it is doing away with its 24-hour time limit for adding content to Stories, the service’s popular feature for posting temporary collections of pictures and videos online.
Until now, Instagram Stories, which launched last year as a copy of a similar Snapchat feature, only allowed users to upload photos and video that were taken within the past 24 hours. (Users would often have to work around that requirement by re-saving content on their smartphones or other devices and then posting it within the one-day time limit.) “Now, you’ll be able to easily find and choose anything from your camera roll and share it instantly with friends,” Snapchat said in a blog post announcing the tweak.
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While the point of temporary post features like Stories, which also disappear 24 hours after they are posted, is to give users a way to share a curated collection of their latest experiences in almost real-time, Instagram obviously recognized that enough users were working around the 24-hour time limit to make it more or less irrelevant. Instead, Instagram says the Stories feature will now offer new “stickers” for posts featuring older content that let users add context explaining when the older photos or videos were taken.
While Stories is pretty much a direct copy of Snapchat’s own feature, it has proven popular for the social media service, as the Instagram Stories feature recently hit 300 million daily active users a little over a year after debuting. On the other hand, Snapchat has struggled to post strong user growth over the past year, adding only 5 million daily users in the most recent quarter to reach 178 million in total.