If you're ever in the mood for a minor existential crisis, go through your Instagram profile and try to decipher what it says about you. Are you an insatiable foodie, traversing the world to find the best bite? Are you always on-trend, always well-lit, always wearing the very latest? Do you have kids? Do you selfie? On a platform that encourages every post to be perfect and beautiful for maximum engagement, you can tell a lot about someone's priorities from their image grid. And as Instagram's popularity continues exploding, that impression matters more than ever.
Starting today, Instagram profiles might start to look a little different. Don't panic: The image grid is still there, and it's still three by three[1]. But above the grid, if you choose, you can now offer a sort of mixtape of your Instagram Stories, which the company hopes will help you give fans an even better sense of who you are.
From now on, every story you capture will automatically download to your phone's camera roll. (You previously had to manually save anything you wanted to keep.) By default they'll go into your Archive, next to the posts you've chosen to yank off your profile because that beer-pong photo doesn't really fit your #brand anymore. But you can choose to share them through what Instagram is calling "Story Highlights," permanent groups of your stories that live on your profile. They'll still leave your story after 24 hours, but they can now live forever.
Let's say you're a travel photographer, on a trip to the Maldives. You're only going to post a couple of times, but you'll be taking stories the whole time. Normally those stories would be gone forever after 24 hours. Now you can create...