Instagram joins the recap bandwagon with Playback and curated stories

Instagram Playback (Image credit: Instagram)

What you need to know

Instagram has launched Playback, a feature that curates Stories from 2021.
Users can edit and share their Playback Stories.

Photo and video-sharing service Instagram is the latest to offer some sort of 2021 recap, with its new Playback feature curating your Stories for easy sharing.

The new feature is showing up at the top of Instagram timelines everywhere, with people being prompted to view and, if necessary, edit their curated list of Stories before sharing them all over again.

The new Playback feature was first reported by The Verge with users seeing their best ten stories by default.

Instagram is getting in on the year-in-review trend with Playback, a feature that will let you relive your Stories from 2021. Instagram will share a curated Playback of 10 Stories for each user, but anyone can edit, add, or remove Stories from their Playback list via their Stories archive, which will pop up within Playback.

Instagram is one of the best iPhone apps for sharing photos and videos online, but it's surprising that the company hasn't gone with something related to its photo grid. Services have popped up to help people share their "top nine" photos in grid form, but Instagram seems to have decided against going that route itself.

Instagram says that the Playback feature should be available to everyone right now, but that it'll be going away in the next few weeks. If you're planning on availing yourself of its services, do it now — and remember to share everything for that extra Instagram clout, too!

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.

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