No more screenshots: Instagram now lets you privately save posts
Instagram is making it a lot easier to mark posts you know you'll want to revisit with a new feature that allows you to privately save posts for later viewing.
Now, when browsing your feed or the app's "explore" section, you'll see a bookmark icon underneath the right side of a photo or video; this is the "save" button.
After you've saved a post, you can go back and look at it by tapping into the new "saved" menu in your profile. Saved photos aren't accessible to anyone else and users won't know if you saved one of their posts.
The feature should come as welcome news to many Instagram users who haven't had an efficient way to save posts they want to look at later. Until now users have often resorted to screenshots or messaging themselves in order to keep track of posts, says Instagram product Manager Ashley Yuki. (There is also a web-based workaround that allows you to save posts without a screenshot, but it requires a few steps.)
"One of the awesome things that our community is doing is discovering a lot of things particularly around interest-based inspiration whether that's food, fashion or beauty," Yuki tells Mashable.
If "interest-based inspiration" sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Pinterest, which is premised on a similar idea.
Of course, Instagram's save feature has an important difference: saved posts are entirely private, at least for now.
"Saving can often be a very personal experience," Yuki says of the decision to keep saved posts private. Still, she says, nothing is off the table just yet.
"There's something interesting there with being able to maybe publish some of the things you saved at some point in the future."
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.
