Instagram is a wellspring of beautiful content, with a constant rush of visuals ranging from graphic design all the way to photography. It's what artists and designers sometimes use for inspiration, even, seeing as how just one scroll can often lead to a rabbit hole of awe-striking visuals.
Instagram Rolls Out Collections
While that's true, there's been no way to actually properly organize such saved photos for later. Even though there are bookmarking options baked into the app, in addition to a special "photos you've liked" section to review photos a user previously gave hearts to, perusing for these could be a messy and chaotic affair, and it might take ages before you can actually pinpoint that particular photo from ages ago.
But this will no longer be a problem thanks to a new feature the company is rolling out now. Instagram will now let users save photos in separate private collections à la Pinterest, rendering the bookmarking tool more useful. Be it GIFs, film screenshots, photos of places, or a particular collection of photos with a similar motif you'd like to chew on at a later time, Instagram's new collections feature aims to help users sort photos properly for easier access.
How To Use Instagram's Collections Feature
To use the new feature, you must first get the latest version of Instagram — 10.16 — on iOS or Android. Scroll through your feed until you end up on a post you'd like to save and then hit the bookmark icon underneath the post to store it in any of your collections. You may either create a brand-new collection or save it to an existing one.
For previously saved posts, users can also create new collections and sort the posts out. To do so, go to the "Saved" section of your Instagram profile and hit the "Collections" tab. Tap the "+" icon, name the new collection, and choose the photos to be added.
All collections and saved posts are private, Instagram explains.
Instagram Parallels With Pinterest
The new feature pushes Instagram to be parallel with Pinterest, which offers a similar bookmarking service. In fact, that's the entire pitch of Pinterest: "pin" content and put them into a single collection. The major difference between the two is that Pinterest encourages users to publicize and share their collections, while Instagram prides on the private nature of its collections, as previously mentioned.
It's unclear how this will affect Pinterest in the long run since people can also search similar content on Instagram, such as recipes, DIY crafts, travel photos, fashion tips, and a laundry list of other categories. Hopefully Pinterest steps its game up, lest Instagram makes it more or less obsolete.
The new collections feature follows Instagram's most recent update to another element of the app — Stories. The company added the ability to add selfie stickers to in-app stories recently, while announcing that it had surpassed, in terms of users, the company from which it copied Stories from Snapchat.
