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You might be interested in this article if:
- You are a social media marketer
- You are in charge of the organization’s Instagram account
- You are a storyteller for a brand or yourself and are always looking for new ways to tell better stories
Instagram Stories are fun and also offer some additional ways to customize our Instagram photos overall. Graphics are one way. Additional photos are another.
The new selfie-within-a-photo feature that rolled out in April 2017. Here’s how that looks:
I did it on a run. First I took a picture of the trail within Instagram Stories and then I used that new functionality to took my selfie directly in the trail photo. There are likely many other reasons that organizations and other Instagram users can use this functionality to tell better stories as well. It doesn’t always have to be a selfie.
I ended up using that photo on Facebook, Instagram and Instagram Stories. And now obviously on here. Create Once, Publish Everywhere in action.
Here’s how I did that:
Shoot the first picture (the trail) in Instagram Stories or grab it from your camera roll.
Related: How to use previously taken photos in Instagram Stories
Click on that smiley button in the top right:
That gives you these options:
Keep in mind that those icons can and do change but this is how it looks on Easter Sunday in 2017.
Click on the photo icon and that opens a smaller camera within the existing image.
You can move that camera around to get a different shot. Once a photo is taken you can move its location on the image too and add a border if you like.
There are two ways to get it onto other networks:
- Screenshot the final and then crop the unnecessary edges in your camera roll app before uploading it to other networks.
- Save the image and/or upload to Instagram feed directly.
Related: How to save Instagram Stories images
Then just upload to those other networks. Easy breezy. The hard part is to figure out what the second photo should be in the moment. The first photo can be taken at one point and used up to 24 hours later. The second photo (the inset one) has to be taken live.
Bonus feature: The Instagram album feature
Instagram also recently rolled out a new feature that allows you to upload a gallery that people can scroll through. That’s nice so when you have multiple photos for a related topic you don’t have to upload them individually. Creating a gallery can make the user experience much better for people viewing your posts.
It’ll be interesting to see if albums take off because it is kind of hard to see what post is actually an album. Only those little dots below the photo show it.