In August 2016, Instagram took a bold and smart step by publishing Stories on its platform. People used to get confused with the format since many were new to the world of expiring posts. However, short video stories are now part of every platform like Facebook, WhatsApp and even YouTube.
Over time, Instagram added a lot of cool features to Stories, and Highlights is one of them. If you, like many others out there, are confused by stories and highlights, then you’ve come to the right place.
Here we will compare the two and see how they differ.
What do you do
On Instagram, the story is the main feature and the highlight is part of it. If you post a story, it only lasts twenty-four hours. However, if the archive setting is enabled, you can always go back and revisit your stories. Plus, you can use the same archived stories to create highlights.
Highlights are like photo albums where you manually decide which photo or story to add. You have full control over the highlights.
life span
Lifespan is one of the main characteristics that differentiate stories from regular posts. Stories only last twenty-four hours, after which they are removed from the public domain. Highlights, on the other hand, have no time limit. They remain indefinitely until the creator manually removes them.
How to identify and access them
As a viewer, there are multiple ways to access and identify stories. The most prominent comes from the Stories bar on the Instagram home screen. Whenever a user uploads a story, it will be available in the stories bar for twenty-four hours.
If you see a red circle around someone’s profile picture while browsing Instagram, it means they’ve published a new story. The red circle around the profile picture is visible in posts, direct messages (DM) and comments. A green circle around a story means it’s only visible to close friends. So tapping a profile picture with a red or green circle will take you to their story.
Finally, when you visit someone’s profile and they have a red circle around their profile picture, tapping on it will open their story.
When it comes to Highlights, there’s no way to know if a user has added a new photo or video from a story to Highlights other than by manually checking. Highlights are available in the user’s profile under the bio.
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Highlights without stories
It is necessary to add an image/video to a story first to create a highlight. The story should be live for a full 24 hours in order to be continued as a highlight. You cannot add highlights directly from your camera roll or gallery. However, here’s a neat trick to do so.
On the contrary, it is not necessary to add a highlight to every story. While all stories are archived, only the ones you select will be added to your highlights.
notifications
If you really like someone’s stories, you can turn on notifications for them. Whenever that particular person posts a story, you will be notified about it. To do this, open their profile and tap on the three-dot icon. Click Turn on story notifications. However, you cannot turn on notifications for Highlights.
folders and cases
As mentioned, Highlights are curated stories. This means you can create multiple highlight folders to categorize your stories. Name your highlights after the stories they contain. For example, you can create highlights for your cat, gadgets, travel journals and the like.
What’s more, you can even add covers to give your highlights a unique touch. Interestingly, if you want to change the highlight cover, it is not necessary to add it to a story first. Instagram has a special option to make it easy to add images directly from gallery just to create covers.
To do this, tap and hold the marker. From the menu, select Edit Highlight, and then select Edit Cover. Then tap on the gallery icon on the far left of the images shown below. Check out similar tips for highlights.
Stories don’t support folders or covers. When you post a story, only your profile picture appears in the story bar. You cannot change the cover photo.
Instagram has another feature called Collections where you organize your saved posts into folders. However, it is for personal use only as collections are not public.
Show counters
When you publish a story, you can see who viewed it. Now when you add it to a highlight and a new person watches it, you’ll see their name in the Seen By section with other viewers. The highlight view counter shows the views it has accumulated on stories and the new ones it has received as a highlight.
That means Highlights don’t get their own counter like Stories do.
If a person has already seen your story and they re-watch your highlights, the view count will not change. Also, Instagram doesn’t separately notify you that the person viewed the same story again.
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Privacy Settings
If you’ve hidden a specific story from someone, the highlight created from that story will have the same settings. If your profile is private, the highlights and stories will remain private as well.
However, if you have a public profile, be careful as anyone can view and download your highlights.
Creation Criteria
Just like Stories, Highlights can be created at any time. There is no need to add a story to a highlight immediately after creation. The stories should stay on your profile for twenty-four hours and the archive should be enabled.
Different and yet similar
Stories and Highlights are two different things. Highlights cannot work without a story and are very helpful for brands as they can present their products in a much better and more organized way.
One thing to remember is that you can’t edit a story once it’s live. So you can edit it if you want to use it as one of your highlights.
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