Instagram Stories get stickers and a hands-free camera option

Instagram has added new features aimed at helping users be more creative in Stories. Today, the Facebook-owned company announced the availability of stickers, for all occasions and specifically for the holidays, along with the ability to record moments hands-free. In addition, the app now lets anyone download their entire day’s collection of story posts in the form of a single video.

When you capture a photo or video to share in a Instagram Story, there are new buttons that enable you to affix stickers right to your post. Not only can you draw and add text, but you can add art specific to the weather, the current time, and even your location — similar to Snapchat. If you add a location sticker, it works just like adding a location to the posts normally shared to your Instagram feed. All you have to do is select the place.

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There are no limits to how many stickers can be added, and they can be moved and resized easily. Plus, the holidays selection includes a special set of stickers and a candy cane brush. These seasonal tools will only last for a few weeks, but they will be replaced by a new set centered around the New Year — again, this is similar to Snapchat, with its special themed tools.

If you’re fond of adding text to your photos and videos in Instagram Stories, the app now supports multiple text fields, and you can even control the alignment.

For those who prefer to post videos, there’s now a hands-free model that lets you simply tap a button to begin recording. This also is something Snapchat users have been able to do albeit with a workaround.

Lastly, for those who love their stories so much that they want to save them, Instagram has tweaked the download option so you are no longer limited to saving individual story posts. Now you can download the past 24 hours of Instagram Stories and have them all stitched together into a single video file. To access this option, tap the Save icon located in the viewing sheet of your story. This feature, however, is currently only available for the iOS version. How this works with Instagram Live is uncertain, but hopefully it’s included there as well.

Launched in August, Instagram Stories gives people a way to quickly snap candid views of their day. More than 100 million people are watching and perusing these pieces of content daily. And what’s happening in Instagram is just like what Facebook is doing within Messenger with the addition of more creative tools in posts.

These latest tools only seem to work with photos and recorded video, so the fact that you can go live within an Instagram Story doesn’t mean you can apply artwork to your ephemeral broadcast…yet.

Updated as of 10:26 a.m. Pacific on Tuesday: Amended that Snapchat users were only able to do hands-free recording through a workaround, not through native support.