Instagram rolls out Highlights and Archive for your Stories

Instagram on Tuesday announced it’s rolling out a pair of new features in its popular mobile app for iPhone that make it easy and fun to hold on to your favorite moments from Stories and share them in ways that help you express yourself better than before.

The first feature, called Highlights, is a new part of your profile where you can express more of who you are through Stories you’ve shared. The other, called Archive, lets you save your Stories into a private collection that only you can see and relive them whenever you want.

TUTORIAL: How to save and organize your favorite Instagram posts into curated collections

Stories Highlights

According to Instagram, Highlights is a feature that “lets you show all the sides of your personality” while keeping your Stories around for more than 24 hours.

You can choose to highlight on your profile anything you’ve shared to your Story in the past. As mentioned before, you can group previously shared Stories into Highlights and feature them in a new section on your profile below your bio. These Highlights stay on your profile until you remove them, and you can have as many of them as you’d like.

To create a highlight, tap the New circle at the far left, then choose any Story from your archive.

Next, select a cover and name your Highlight. The highlight appears as a circle on your profile that can be tapped to play as a standalone Story (tap and hold a Highlight to remove it).

Stories Archive

No longer shall your Stories disappear forever after 24 hours.

Thanks to Archive, another new feature in this Instagram update, your Stories are automatically saved to your private archive as soon as they expire so that you can revisit them later or add them easily to a Highlight on your profile.

A new toggle in your profile settings lets you turn auto-archiving of Stories on or off at any time. Simply tap the Archive icon on your profile page to see what you’ve saved so far.

You can switch between your Posts Archive and your new Stories Archive.

Saved Stories appear in a grid with the most recent one at the bottom. The first Story from each day shows a date indicator to help you navigate the archive as you scroll.

TUTORIAL: How to archive your Instagram posts

Tap the Story to watch it and optionally add it to your current Story or share it as a post or add it to your Highlight. As mentioned, only you can see your archived Stories.

The two new features require Instagram version 25 for iOS and Android or later. To learn more about Stories Highlights and Stories Archive, visit Instagram’s help center.

Instagram is a free download from App Store.