Life

Here’s What To Do If You Don’t Have Instagram Story Highlights Yet

by Brittany Bennett
Instagram

It's no secret that Instagram has become a platform from which creativity and straight up, grown ass adult careers can take off. The beauty of social media is the ways in which you can express your talents to a community — or just your best friends. And now the most recent development allowing us to ~express~ ourselves is the Instagram story highlights. If you're wondering why you don't have Instagram story highlights yet, don't worry, you will. And soon after your app is updated on Dec. 5, you'll be on your way to putting your best content forward.

Musicians get albums comprised of their greatest hits. Montages of actors in their most moving scenes flood YouTube. Why shouldn't your golden content get a celebratory montage to relive its glory? Hey, those perfectly focused pictures capturing a harmonious moment of light and frozen action deserve more than their allotted 15 minutes of fame before the next wave of content buries it. Instagram Story Highlights lets your best boomerangs last a little longer. It's a way to showcase your eye for framing avocado toast. It's where you can let your skill for stop motion shine. With your best content forward, you get to let the expansive universe that is Instagram know you and your versatile style a little better. It's an exciting time to snap pictures and curate personal galleries. If you don't have the latest feature just yet, you will soon.

Bustle

With the latest update of Instagram, to version 25 — we've come a long way together, friends — you'll find two exciting updates: The "Stories Archive" will allow you to save your stories within the app. This means that the videos, pictures, and boomerangs that once had a lifespan of a mere 24 hours can now be made immortal. They'll live in a private section of your personal archive where you can continue to share them long after they expire.

This is where "Story Highlights" comes in.

A spokesperson from Instagram explains that the Stories Highlights is "a new part of [your] profile that lets you group and feature stories you've shared in the past to more completely express who you are on Instagram." You know when you share a story and it results in more than one DM in your Instagram inbox? Being able to evoke that kind of response is encouraging — you're connecting with a community, learning more about what you can create and what your followers respond to. The best of your best can now be stored to archives and reused in highlights. Add, edit, delete and basically curate your highlight gallery of greatest hits as they come to fully capture your versatility as an actor, I mean photographer, I mean filmmaker, I mean food artist — I mean, just a general creative person with an Instagram account!

Instagram

The release of this feature should be available for you to play with on your coffee break as soon as 10 AM on December 5th. If you don't see the option to add a highlight in your profile, you can do a few things:

1. Update Your App

First, make sure you are updated to Instagram version 25. You can do this by going to the app store and clicking update.

2. Uninstall And Redownload

If a straight update doesn't work, a spokesperson for Instagram advises, "try uninstalling the Instagram app. Then download the latest version of the Instagram app on the App Store or Play Store. Then force quit the app again." When you open the app up and head to your profile, you should be all set to start highlighting your talent!

If either of those don't work, don't fret: The feature is rolling out to everyone's profile, so it could just be that it hasn't gotten to you yet. It will soon! When you do have Story Highlights, trust me: It'll be worth the wait.