7 hidden features in the latest Snapchat update
Between motion-tracking emoji and face swapping with saved photos, there's been no shortage of feature-packed Snapchat updates of late.
But there's a lot more you can do outside of the app's camera. Snapchat rolled out a major revamp to its chat features last month, which added a ton of new ways you can share through the chat section of the app -- even if some of them are a little hidden.
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Luckily, we've done all the hard work for you and dug up all the new ways you can share. So, listen up and take notes -- you're about to up your Snapchat chatting game.
1. Send your location
When you type a specific address into chat, it displays in a card that deep links to the Google or Apple Maps app.
2. Search for the perfect sticker
Snapchat has a hidden search feature built in to help you find relevant stickers while you're chatting with friends. (This is actually pretty handy as Snapchat has more than a hundred stickers built in to its app so this trick should save your thumbs a lot of scrolling.
To search for a sticker, type a keyword into the chat window and then hit the sticker button (the smiley face on the far right). The stickers that appear first will be the ones most relevant to the keywords you typed.
3. View and share links
You can now exchange links within chats and the links will open in the in-app browser, so you can view them without having to leave the app. Once you're done, tap the down arrow at the top of the page to exit the browser and navigate back to the chat.
4. Share multiple photos at once
The new chat features also make it a lot easier to share multiple photos at once. Once you've sent them, the batch of photos will appear together in the conversation, not spaced out as they did in previous versions. You can also include videos in the groups of photos you can share, which brings us to...
5. Share videos inside of chats
In addition to sharing live video, you can also share video you've already shot inside of chats. Selecting a video works the same as selecting a photo and you can also annotate a video with doodles, text and even those new motion-tracking emoji.
6. Check if someone is in the chat at the same time as you
In previous versions of the app, the only indicator that you and a friend were looking at the same chat simultaneously was the send button, which would turn blue when both parties were viewing messages at the same time.
The new update swaps the blue button for -- what else -- an emoji, which appears whenever both people are looking at the same chat at the same time. No more lurking in chats unnoticed!
7. Share photos, text and stickers while on video calls
You can share text and stickers and photos while you are video chatting with friends. When you opt to share from within a video chat, photos, text and stickers will briefly appear overlaid onto the video feed before fading out of view.
You'll still be able to see everything that was shared during the video call after the fact though as all text, stickers and photos will appear back in the chat screen once you've left the call.
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Topics Snapchat
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
