Use Instagram’s Collections Feature to Keep Cool Posts
Last year, Instagram introduced Collections , a way to organize your photos in the app into different carefully curated groups. This is a feature that has been around for about a year, but most people don’t even know it exists.
If you use Instagram even moderately regularly, this feature can be very useful for saving posts you find interesting so you can find them later without scrolling through your feed endlessly.
To use it, simply click on the bookmark image in the lower right corner of the picture, and then select “Save to Collection” when it appears over the image. From there you will be prompted to create a new Collection or add an image to an existing one.
The key to making this work is to keep things organized while saving images, rather than just tossing them all in one folder.
While a shared folder is essentially no good for anyone (and the chances of you going back to check it out are pretty much nil), organizing images into different segments while saving them can be a pretty rewarding practice and save you time when you want to find these cool Instagram posts later. Here are some ideas on how to take advantage of this feature:
Restaurants to try
If your friend is eating a lobster right now that you think should have been in front of your eyes, add it to your restaurants to try the folder. Later, when you’re trying to figure out where to eat or what to cook for dinner, flip through your collection of food photos for a little inspiration.
In fact, I do it more with food I want to taste and cook than with places I want to go to physically eat. For example, a few weeks ago a friend of mine posted these delicious looking gnocchi from some trendy Italian establishment in New York. Since I live in San Francisco, it would be a hell of a lunch trip, but after looking at a photo and a few searches for recipes on the internet, I headed off for a delicious dinner that I probably wouldn’t have come up with. blue on my own, if I had not seen the picture.
Travel locations
Nothing inspires people to post photos on Instagram like a wonderful vacation – a wonderful vacation that you would like to be on. Save your images of sandy beaches and scenic mountains to your Travel Destination folder. Even better, if your friends are currently traveling to a specific country that you want to visit (or are planning to visit), then create collections for each destination.
For example, my boyfriend and I are going to go to Italy and France this fall. This is a trip that we have been planning since last year and only the main countries were included in our plans. Over the last year, when friends went to those places, I kept interesting things. Now, instead of saying, “Oh, I saw this thing on Jake’s Instagram that looked cool,” or trying to remember if something was posted by Jake, John or Julie, I can just open my handy Italy folder and instantly find the post I’m looking for.
Pets / Children Photos
If you have a pet or child, or your sister / brother has just acquired a pet or has given birth to a baby, people will expect you to have photographs. Build a collection of all the best photos from this birthday / holiday party, then show people that when they ask, rather than dig into a hopeless abyss, it’s a camera scrolling on your phone.