Instagram Will Finally Let You Create Stories With Photos & Videos Older Than 24 Hours

If I've been able to identify any one downside to Instagram Stories (and if you're a frequent Story user, you know that there aren't many), it's that most of my camera roll has thus far been untouchable. Want to add a photo you took more than a day ago to your story? Too bad. Take a screenshot of it or forget about it. Right? Wrong! Insta's made some adjustments, and this update might be the coolest yet. Now, if you're wondering how you can add photos and videos that are more than 24 hours old to your Instagram Stories, it's as simple as swiping through your camera roll and selecting whatever you want — the app has finally made it possible to add whatever you want to your Story, no matter what date it's from.

It's about as simple as you'd hope it would be — and super intuitive too. Next time you swipe up from the Story screen to add a photo that's already been taken, you'll notice a serious change to the way the feature works. Your full camera roll is now available, allowing you the option to add any image or photo from your phone's history to your latest Story. IG Stories, once good mostly for instantaneous sharing (if not instantaneous, then within a period of 24 hours or less), can now be used to share your memories. You'll take a lot fewer screenshots, and you'll still have the chance to showcase some deeper photographic cuts.

I'm anxious to see how things play out with the new update. While I'm personally pretty psyched about this development, I also understand why Stories wasn't designed to work this way from the beginning — and I wonder what the change will mean for how we use the function moving forward. The introduction of Stories in August 2016 seriously cut back on the number of "spur of the moment" images posted to actual feeds (at least, my actual feed). I've noticed fewer "check out this ice cream cone!" or "watch the storm moving in!" posts, finding instead that photos of delicious desserts or gray skies are snapped quickly and added directly to Stories. As a result, "real" posts now seem to be the ones that have greater implications or a larger message, and the world of Instagram is a generally more curated one. Stories, specifically, have come to have a more "seize the moment" quality. Until now, at least, they've lived in the present, while the rest of the app demands a bit more forethought and planning.

So, what will happen now that you can pull from your full camera roll for Instagram Stories? My gut instinct is that Stories will become increasingly curated, and while that's not inherently a bad thing (today, for example, I was pretty psyched that I could so easily grab a photo from Nov. 8, 2016 as an homage to the optimism I felt on that fateful election morning exactly one year ago), I do worry that Stories will eventually lose its sense of spontaneity. Will yet another level of the app be required to satisfy our need for "this just in!" imagery? Will it soon be frowned upon for me to post photos of my most recent meal to Stories — as it is already for standard Instagram — because the expectation is that I pull so-called "better" content logged from days gone by?

I'm excited to be able to more easily work older images into my beloved Stories, but I certainly have my fingers crossed that this update won't change the spirit of the feature entirely. I've gotta get my raw, uncensored videos of random cute dogs and cool weather events somewhere.