Instagram has announced the launch of Instants. It’s both a feature in the main smartphone app and a standalone app that offers the ability to share photos that disappear as soon as followers have seen them.
Users add the caption before taking the photo which is posted as soon as the image is captured in-app. It’s a disposable camera like experience free from filters, with no further edits permitted. There is a slight grace period to recall the pic before it gets posted to friends if, say, it catches you at a bad angle. Other than that it’s as snap-and-share as mobile photography gets.
Users can snap as many pics as they want using the feature, which appears in the bottom right corner of the inbox within the main Instagram app. Any instants taken by your pals will appear as a stack in the same corner of the app. in terms of the standalone Instants app, it simply allows faster access to the camera experience. You’ll still log in with the same details.
The new ephemeral feature, which is likely to unleash a new brand of thirst traps across the remarkably horny platform, still enables followers to react and reply to the image, but in terms of viewing? That’s a one-time only deal. Instants will still appear in the poster’s archive for a year and they can always be reshared as recaps within Stories that last for 24-hours. So they’re not, strictly speaking, as ephemeral as they seem.
“We want to make it easier to share in the moment with friends — so we’re introducing Instants, a new way to share casual, everyday photos that disappear after your friends view them,” Instagram says in a blog post. “Instants live in the bottom right corner of your Instagram inbox, and with a simple tap of the camera, you can share photos with close friends or mutuals (followers you follow back). No edits, no pressure, just life as it happens.”
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