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Snapchat Update: ‘Memories’ Will Let You Save Your Snaps, Reshare Old Snap Stories

By Patricia Grannum
Published on: 08:36 PST, Jul 6, 2016

Snapchat is letting you save your “memories.” The social media company revealed via its blog today that it has added a new Snapchat feature which will allow users to save their snaps forever, Us Weekly reports. The new feature is called Memories.

“Memories is a new way to save Snaps and Stories on Snapchat. It’s a personal collection of your favorite moments that lives below the Camera screen. Just swipe up from the Camera to open Memories,” the social media juggernaut shared via its blog on Wednesday, July 6.

According to the Snapchat blog post, Memories will allow you search through the images you have saved by keyword or by image. It will also allow you to re-share old images that are in your memory bank.

“You can use Memories to create new Stories from Snaps you’ve taken, or even combine different Stories into a longer narrative!” the Snapchat blog post added. “It’s fun to celebrate an anniversary or birthday by finding a few old Snaps and stringing them together into a new Story.”

Snapchat users will also be able to add emojis to their old snaps and edit them in other ways. However, if your snap was taken more than 24 hours ago, it will have a white border around it to let your followers know that it’s from the past.

Memories wasn’t the only Snapchat update that was revealed today. The company also unveiled “My Eyes Only,” which will allow you to keep your snaps private if you wish. Snapchat users will have to enter a password to take advantage of this new feature.

The new Snapchat features won’t be available immediately, but will be gradually added to the app over the next month or so. When it’s ready, Snapchat users will see a chat message from Team Snapchat with details on the update.

While the company blog tried to sell Memories as a positive new addition to its app, the reaction to the Snapchat new feature has been mixed so far on social media.

Gizmodo was a bit more pessimistic about the Snapchat update. In an article titled “Snapchat Is Ruined,” writer William Turton bemoaned that the changes to the app will ruin what made it special in the first place.

“This feels just like when Instagram turned on an algorithmic timeline. It destroyed one of the underlying core principles that made the app so good.”

Turton added that because of Snapchat Memories, people are going to upload their most polished, edited photos which will ultimately kill the spontaneity that we’ve all come to associate with Snapchat.

“Spontaneity is what made the app so fun to use. I check Snapchat to see what friends are up to right now, as it happens. The next day the slate is wiped clean, ready for new content from that day. I don’t want to see an edited photo from your vacation in Belize six months ago.”

Since its creation, Snapchat has become a very popular platforms for people to share snippets of their lives. It used to be the playground for millennials but, as ratings company Comscore reports, the app has become more and more mainstream. In 2013, Snapchat was being regularly used by only 5 percent of smartphone users age 25-34 and 2 percent of users age 35. Today, according to Comscore, Snapchat usage in each of those demographics is 38 percent and 14 percent.

[Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images]

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