Instagram Now Lets You Save *Your* Stories As Highlights, But What About Your Friend's?

Instagram is always tweaking the app, but on Tuesday, the social media platform introduced one of the biggest changes since it released Instagram Stories — they've added a better way for you to archive and display your Stories on your profile page if you want. It's a great way to save your Stories right there in the app, but can you save someone else's Instagram Story as a Highlight, too?

Instagram made two changes on Tuesday. One was to reorganize how Archives work. The Archive was launched in June this year and can be found by tapping on the little clock icon on your profile. That's where you can save posts that you don't really want in your feed any longer but aren't ready to delete. With Tuesday's update, now all of your Instagram Stories will be saved there, too, for safe keeping, so you don't have to save them in your phone anymore. Only you'll be able to see what you save.

The Archive is integral to how Highlights works. Highlights are now going to be displayed as circular little thumbnails on your profile page, just like how people's Stories are displayed up top on your home screen in the app.

To make one, you can choose up to 100 photos or Stories to add to a highlight. All you have to do is tap the "plus" icon and then select the Stories you want to group together. Then you just add a name (it can be a collection name or just an emoji), a cover photo, and click done. Voilá — now your have a Highlight. You can create as many as you want, and they'll stay on your profile until you remove it or edit it. (You just have to press and hold the Highlight to get in there and make changes.)

Both Archive and Highlights are just more ways to curate your Instagram page and keep your memories close. So right now, you can only put your own Stories in a Highlight. Instagram wrote on its blog, "Stories Highlights is a new part of your profile where you can express more of who you are through stories you’ve shared," so it's not about saving your squad's Stories (even if you look really good in one of the pics).

Everyone's Instagram Story will auto-archive into their own collection, but only be available to them. Hopefully there will be a way sometime soon to share and collect your friends' stories through Archive, but for now, this is just a way of creating a personal "Highlight" reel to show on your profile.

If you ever want to stop auto-saving your Stories, you can, but for now it's sort of nice to know that your Stories won't just disappear without everyone getting to see it first. Of course, you can always delete the ones you don't want to remember, too.

Tech experts over at Recode are already guessing that a lot of brands will take to Highlights first, as the perfect way to make the most of their campaigns and get as many views as possible way after 24 hours.

When Stories first rolled out, one of the main draws was that it was similar to Snapchat in that they disappeared right away, but given that no one's forced to make a Highlight or even save their Stories if they don't want to in public, the new changes shouldn't affect anyone's love of Boomerangs.

Also, you know that you've secretly been bummed a few times when you saw a particularly good Instagram Story you made just disappear into the ether after 24 hours, so you know you'll love this feature as soon as you start using it.

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