Instagram is rapidly growing its feature set, and last year it introduced its biggest new feature to date: Instagram Stories. Stories work exactly how Snapchat’s own Stories feature works. You take a photo, overlay it with filters, emojis, stickers, drawings or AR filters, and send it to your “story” where it exists for 24 hours before it is lost forever. You can put as many photos or video clips as you want in your story at once, and create a daily picture slideshow that tells your followers and viewers about your day as they scroll through their content. With over 200 million daily users, Instagram’s growth is huge – much larger than its direct competitor Snapchat, which has an active user base of around 166 million. Despite arriving late to the party, Instagram seems to be beating Snapchat at its own game.
If you’re looking to switch from Instagram to Snapchat, you may be wondering how exactly you can save both your own stories and those of other users you follow on Instagram. Snapchat’s own app lets you easily save stories in the “Memories” section, making it easy to revisit and reshare content months after capturing a moment. How do Instagram Stories compare? Let’s take a look at how you can easily save Instagram stories together.
Saving Your Own Stories
To save your story on your device, you must first create a story. Open your Instagram app – we’re using the Android version, but the iOS version is nearly identical in design and capability – and tap the “Add to Your Story” button in the Stories row on your device or the Camera button in the top left corner of your screen. This will open the camera interface for stories and messages, which is nearly identical in design to what we see from Snapchat’s own Stories.
From this interface, you can apply any kind of live filters, effects or mods to the camera app. There are also a few different settings you can apply to yourself. You can also record video clips by holding down the shutter button. After capturing your picture or video, you will be taken to a screen that allows you to preview or edit your photo with options for stickers, brushes and text to be placed on your screen. If you want to send the capture to someone else, you can tap “Next” to continue the screen. In the lower left corner of your screen, you will see a few more options such as “Save” and “Your Story”. Tapping “Your Story” will automatically embed the image or video in your story for your followers to see. Tapping “Save” will automatically save your photo or video to an “Instagram” folder on your device on Android and your camera roll on iOS. The photo is recorded in full size on the widescreen; for example, our Galaxy S7 Edge test captured the photo at 9.1 MP (a standard widescreen view on a 12 MP camera).
If you’ve already saved a photo to your story on Instagram and want to save it retroactively to your device, you can tap the photo inside your story to view your story. Once inside your story view, tap the three-dot menu button in the lower right corner of your screen to view your story options. From here, you can save your story to your device at full resolution without having to rely on taking screenshots or any other capture service that will cause the resolution to drop. Unlike Snapchat, your photos and videos will remain high quality without artifacts or degrading aspects, even after you post them.
Saving Others’ Stories
Despite the notion that most stories will end in twenty-four hours, it’s no secret that many Instagram Stories users like to keep photos of their friends’ lives publicly. If your best friend or someone close to you threw up a picture or video you wanted to save, sit back – just like with Snapchat, you can directly take a screenshot of another user’s stories. And even better, Instagram doesn’t notify other users that stories are taking a screenshot, so unlike Snapchat, public stories is a free game to take and save screenshots without letting other users know your true intentions. Let’s have a look.
Photo Recording
Saving a photo on both Android and iOS is as easy as capturing a regular screenshot. On iOS, press and hold the Power and Home button together until the screen flashes and the screenshot effect plays. Your saved image will be added to your camera roll, but it’s worth noting that your image will be saved at the resolution of your screen, not the resolution at the time the photo was taken. On Android, the screenshot method typically depends on your particular phone model, but traditionally most modern phones use a combination of Power and Volume Down. If you’re using a Samsung phone with a Home button, you’d use a combination of Power and Home button just like in iOS.
As we mentioned above, Instagram won’t prompt your screenshotted target to capture their story and save it to your phone unless you save a direct message, so don’t worry about saving a photo to your device – no one will be any smarter. .
Video Recording
Recording videos is not surprisingly much more difficult, especially on iOS. Let’s start with Android. The easiest way to record a video on your device is to use a screen recording app, and the good news is there are tons of great free, easy-to-use screen capture software on the Play Store. We’ve written about all kinds of recording software before, but our personal favourite, a great, totally free editor that can record audio through your microphone and speaker, DU Recorder includes a really cool video editor for trimming and merging clips. and does not contain any ads or in-app purchases. We’ve written a complete guide on using DU Recorder and you can find it here.
It’s a little harder for iOS users. MacOS users can use QuickTime together to record and capture their screen, but the frame rate can be a bit choppy and look bad depending on which Mac you use for the shot. Apowersoft has also made recording software that uses Airplay to create an image of your device on Windows or Mac, but both of these solutions require having separate computers to capture your footage. Here’s the good news: iOS 11, released this fall, will include native screen recording capabilities and will eventually catch up with its green rivals in terms of specs. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until September to actually use the feature, but it’s on the way and this is great news for iPhone owners looking to capture the magic of a friend’s story on Instagram. Keep up with updates on both your phone and this story, and we’ll let you know when something changes in iOS as a platform. As for recording in QuickTime or Apowersoft, you can read more about these two apps here.
***
Instagram’s Stories feature may be a direct copy of what we see on Snapchat, but they also do it better in many ways. You can easily save your photo in full resolution, something you can’t do via Snapchat (because Snapchat takes the photos at your screen resolution instead of a proper photo), and the ability to save your photos and videos directly to your device even later. the same goes for the ability to capture other people’s stories without warning the user that you’re screenshotting or capturing their stories. Instagram may be mimicking Snapchat’s main addition to social networks, but once they do it very well, you can’t push them too hard.
