On Wednesday, Snapchat introduced an update feature dubbed “Memories” that finally lets people do something they’ve wanted to do for a while: save and share their favorite snaps forever inside the app.
While the update removes a piece of the ephemeral nature of the app, the new feature brings with it some highly desirable changes.
With Memories, Snapchatters can now save their favorite video and photo snaps to the app itself in a photo album collection called Memories. These memories show up as a set of photos, stories or collections saved in reverse-chronological order.
Different kinds of posts take different shapes: Rectangular posts are individual snaps and circular posts are stories, complete with live previews of the snaps they contain. The Memories section of Snapchat also has a number of tabs for viewing your individual saved snaps, stories, or for accessing your phone’s complete camera roll. By holding down on any snap, you can access a menu that allows you to do everything from editing it to adding geofilters, timestamps and more. Any snaps saved to Memories can also now be posted to your public stories. If the snaps are older, they’ll be framed in white and include a timestamp so no one is confused about when the photos were taken.
Besides the current public story posted to your profile, the update also allows Snapchatters to select multiple photos and put them together into new stories that can be sent as attachments in messages. With all the functionality Memories adds, this is easily one of the biggest updates Snapchat has seen this year.
But even though Snapchat is adding an element of permanence to the app, it still has worked hard to keep users’ privacy in mind. The memories feature also allows you a way to tag saved snaps as “for my eyes only” so those items won't show up in stories others view.
Why Can’t I Get Snapchat Memories Working?
Even though Snapchat issued an update today, and the change log notes discuss the Memories features, unfortunately, it isn’t available to everyone yet. In a blog about the new feature, Snapchat said they were slowly rolling out Memories to users over the next month.
“It’s a big change for our service,” the company wrote, “so we want to make sure everything is running smoothly! You’ll receive a Chat from Team Snapchat when Memories is ready for you to use.”
