Hot on the heels of rival social media network Snapchat, Facebook has introduced self-destructing photo statuses to all of their apps. This allows you to upload personalised ‘picture updates’ to share with your friends that disappear after 24 hours.
The idea is to ‘tell a story’ using a picture of yourself, where you are, or what you’re doing, and personalise it with the stickers and effects that the app provides. This does mean that both the main Facebook and Messenger apps are becoming a lot more crowded, but the feature is reportedly becoming more popular. (If you’re not seeing these features yet, you possibly need to update your app through your app store.)
Updating Your Facebook Story
Using this feature is actually very easy and intuitive. Facebook also checks who you’d like to post the updates to, so it’s OK to have a play with the filters and features without fear of accidentally uploading a terrible selfie!
Simply click on the ‘+ story’ button at the top of the app, or swipe right, to open Facebook Camera. You can either take a new picture, or upload one from your phone by clicking the square picture icon in the bottom left. If you want to make a video instead, you just keep your finger pressed on the shutter button for the duration of the video.
Once the camera is open, click the magic wand and you can start playing with the effects! There are options to ‘dress up’, where the camera detects faces and adds features such as sunglasses or hats, filters, or frames.
Once you’ve completed your masterpiece, click the arrow, and then you can choose to either send it to certain friends (where it will appear in their chat) or add it to your story, which means anyone you’re friends with can view it:
Until you get to this screen, everything you do is just for you, so you can play around as much as you want.. After 24 hours, each video or photo will disappear completely from your feed, so if it’s rare picture opportunity then you may want to save the picture separately to your phone!
