You Can Try These Three New Instagram Features Right Now
This week , Instagram introduced three new features for Posts, Reels, and Stories. If you’re an avid poster, you may have already noticed these features, but for the rest of us in hiding, there are some cool new features worth checking out.
First, Instagram now lets you add text and stickers to photos and carousels. If you’re used to adding these elements to videos and stories, you’ll be right at home here: When creating a new post, select an image to post, then click the text button to add text to the image. You can choose the font, color, background, alignment, size and position of the text, just like in the story. Click “Done” to secure the text.
To add a sticker, tap Gallery , then select a photo to overlay on top of the post. Place the sticker wherever you want, pinch and drag to make it larger or smaller. You can touch the sticker you just created to change its shape to a circle, heart, star or square. You can even customize what layer of the image this sticker is on (i.e. above or below other elements of the post). Simply touch and hold a sticker and then swipe up or down to select a new sticker layer.
Next, Instagram is adding new fonts, animations, and effects to text in videos and stories. To try them out, select an image or video to add to your story or reel, then click the text button . You can scroll through all the font options (I see 14, but it’s unclear which ones are new), then click the animation button to switch between the different animations. There are three of them: A typewriter that prints text; Pop, which briefly explodes your text; and Jump, which places your text in a frame. You can also click the effects button to add an effect on top of these options. Right now I see Sparkle, which adds stars to your text; and Neon, which adds a glow effect.
Finally, Instagram is launching big carousels. For a long time, you could only add 10 photos per post. Making this decision requires a lot of editing, and a lot of great photos end up on the cutting room floor. Instagram will now allow you to add up to 20 photos to your carousel. Will this be too much? Will people add three, five or 10 photos too many to a post? If so, oh well, just keep scrolling.
These new features follow Instagram’s last big feature update: Profile Music , a new option that allows you to add a song to your Instagram profile. It’s reminiscent of music profiles on Myspace, which you might be surprised to actually still exist .