Flipagram now lets you natively capture photos and video within its app

Flipagram has made a name for itself as an app that lets you curate media into a video story, but up to now, you had to import the content from your camera roll. The company has now released an update that includes an in-app camera feature, dubbed Flipacam, that enables you to quickly create “flips” without having to leave the service.

The idea is to let users be more spontaneous, and the camera brings in an experience familiar to Snapchat users — you don’t need a complex workflow; just take the photo or video and let it tell the tale. When you’re using the app, you’ll see a button that lets you take a picture. Tap to capture a photo and hold it to record a video. When you’re done, just compile all the media as you normally would in order to produce the story you want. You can add moments from other sources if you’d like and even include music and filter effects. These flips are limited to less than a minute in length.

Flipagram considers the camera to be an “ephemeral” part of the process, meaning that it won’t store a copy of any of the images or videos you’ve taken within the app on your device’s camera roll — again, just like Snapchat.

“Rather than sharing a single highlight photo or short video clip, people increasingly want to tell a whole story with many photo and video moments,” said CEO Farhad Mohit. “Our new Flipacam makes it incredibly easy to capture such moments as they’re happening and quickly turn them into flips without having individual photos and videos take up unnecessary space on people’s devices.”

All media created using Flipacam is in full HD 1920 resolution.

And while it might seem that this camera feature should have been included long ago, its absence doesn’t seem to have slowed Flipagram down. The app now counts nearly 200 million unique users, mostly teens, and 13 billion moments shared. The company estimates that there have been about 1.5 billion daily views of photos and video moments in flips on the Web as of December.

The addition of Flipacam and the streamlined process for creating a story within the app could spur usage even further.