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Instagram now lets you save your own stories and mute others

instagram stories

Instagram has issued another Snapchat-inspired update to its app, the latest in an aggressive series since the company’s big redesign in May. In version 9.3, released today, Instagram has added some new options to the app’s Snapchat-style “stories” feature that it unveiled last month. Users will now be able to save the photos and videos that they post to their stories to the camera roll automatically by default, and they can also mute the stories of people they follow.

Saving stuff you post to your stories is another feature lifted from Snapchat. To activate it, you just tap the gear icon in the stories camera interface and flip the “Save Shared Photos” button. You can either save your stories wholesale or, when viewing your story, save the individual photos or videos by tapping the three dots in the lower right corner.

Instagram hasn’t let up

Muting stories is a bit more straightforward — you just tap and hold on the particular story that you want to mute. It should help solve one of the early knocks on Instagram’s version of the idea, which is that it was easy to feel inundated by the amount of Instagram stories that show up at the top of the app. (People tend to follow more accounts on Instagram than they do on Snapchat.) Now, when you mute a particular account’s Instagram story, it moves the corresponding bubble to the end of the stories queue. The app also won’t automatically flip to that story if you’ve viewed everyone else’s — you have to un-mute it to view it again.

Instagram also added the ability to pick a color when you add text to stories, another small idea that makes up part of the goofy fun of Snapchat. At this point, it’s safe to say this won’t be the last of Snapchat’s ideas to come to Instagram.

Correction: This story previously stated that users could only save their entire story, not individual elements. This story has been updated to reflect that.