Meta is working on letting you pinch to zoom on Instagram stories

Zooming in on Instagram stories with the familiar pinch gesture will make it easier to discern tiny text and examine image details in people’s stories up close.

Marketing image with a tagline "Everyone has a story" in white font printed on top of a colorful Instagram gradient background
  • What’s happening? Instagram is working on the ability to zoom in on stories.
  • Why care? You’ll finally be able to zoom in on tiny text and other hard-to-discern details in those busy Instagram stories using the familiar pinch gesture.
  • What to do? Maybe stop posting stories with tons of text…

Instagram stories zoom feature is in the works

Mobile developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi has discovered support for Instagram stories zooming in app code. He was able to get the feature to work, demonstrating it via a video shared through his Twitter profile.

Instagram has always supported the ability to zoom in on images shared in the feed. Adding pinch-to-zoom support for stories is a much-needed improvement.

Paluzzi also shared in another Twitter post that you’ll be able to react to stories published on Valentine’s Day by choosing from half a dozen different heart emoji.

How is Instagram stories zooming useful?

I, for one, will be happily pinch-zooming on most stories I encounter on Instagram. Even if you have a perfect vision, many Instagram stories are difficult to read.

That’s not your fault; it’s because some people tend to litter their stories with lots of text. It’s fitness trainers publishing weekly workout programs, foodies posting long recipes and folks with too much time on their hands sharing complex thoughts—all on a single screen, using tiny text that’s very challenging to discern.

The problem isn’t limited to cramming too much text in a single story. Many people only share media in their stories, but I still need to zoom in on a particular detail thanks to the poor quality owing to Instagram’s heavy compression.

In all those cases, the ability to easily zoom in on stories will come in handy.

When will Meta release this feature?

At any rate, this seems like one of those features that Instagram should have had right from the start. The Signal app, for example, has supported stories zooming from the first moment it debuted the Stories feature.

It’s unclear when Instagram might launch this feature. It shouldn’t be long, considering that Instagram stories zooming seems to be in testing now.

Some people have acknowledged on social media that they’ve been playing with this feature in the past few days. At any rate, iDB will be making sure to inform you when Meta releases the Instagram stories zoom feature to all users of the app.

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