Instagram launches Instants for ephemeral photo sharing with specific people
Instagram today is introducing Instants, which is both a feature and an app. Instants is billed as “a new way to share in the moment – with spontaneous, unfiltered photos” that go out to your friends. These are ephemeral to viewers, but are saved in your archive for up to a year and can be reshared as a recap to Stories.
Your friends can react and reply, with replies going straight to your DMs. The new Instants “companion app” provides quicker camera access for the feature and is now rolling out to iOS and Android “in select countries”.
So Instants is basically just a way for you to share photos with your close friends or your followers whom you follow back, photos that disappear once they’ve been viewed. Instants live in the bottom right corner of your Instagram DM Inbox as a mini stack of photos.
When you share an Instant, you can add a caption (which goes first, unlike with Stories) but no further edits are possible. You can always choose who to share an Instant with. There’s even an Undo button in case you want to quickly take something back. In the top right corner of Instants you can access your archive, which is visible only to you.
