Instagram Stories turns one: Ten tricks to settle scores!

Visual communication app Instagram on 2 August celebrated the first anniversary of its popular 'Stories feature', which has been well accepted by the social media buffs.

As a mark of celebration, the makers of the app released a special birthday sticker pack in stories to help its global community mark their own milestones and those of friends and family.

Along with this, Instagram also released a set of tips and tricks to help explore the feature in a better manner:

-Reply to Stories with photo and video: While watching a story, you can use the new camera button to reply with a photo or a video. You can even use tools like face filters, stickers and rewind in your replies.

-Clone yourself with selfie stickers: Using the upper right hand corner of the screen, bring up your stickers menu. Tap the new selfie icon, take a photo and tap the button below to capture a mini selfie to post your reactions and face-swap with friends.

-Put a pin in it: To pin your selfie sticker or any other sticker or piece of text to a spot on screen, select the sticker and hold your finger down to move it to a final location. Tap pin and voila - there it stays, even over moving video!

-Rewind your video: Rewind is a new camera format that will play your video in reverse.

-Hashtag sticker: Add a hashtag in a story with simple text or the new hashtag sticker. Tap the hashtag to explore related content.

-Get a closer look: Hold down on the video circle and swipe up to zoom in on a photo or video. You can even do it with one finger.

-Experiment with erasing: With the new eraser brush, you can erase other things you've drawn and play around with removing color in Stories.

-Color block your screen: If you choose a color from the palette on the bottom of your stories screen and hold your finger down on the screen, the entire screen will turn that color-giving you a backdrop that you can write or draw on, add stickers to, or even selectively erase to show the photo beneath.

-Color code your text: If you want your text to appear in different colors versus only one, select a letter or word and then click on the new color you want it to turn. Change up the color combo any way you choose.

-Transform a Live photo into a Boomerang: Upload a Live photo from your iPhone to Instagram Stories and turn it into a Boomerang by long-pressing.

Instagram Stories, since its inception has attracted 700 million users from around the world, 250 million of whom are daily users.

Since last year, Instagram rolled out over 20 new features from shooting boomerangs right in your story, to stickers and face filters, to the ability to link to other accounts. 

-ANI