With over 500 million daily active Stories users worldwide, Instagram Stories, a blatant imitation of Snapchat’s very similar feature, has become quite popular with time. The success of Stories is driven by the ephemeral nature of the content. Stories allow you to share content with your followers and fans, which auto erases from your Instagram feed after a 24-hour window. Once the story disappears in thin air, no one can view it. Even better, if you are not comfortable sharing a story with your entire follower list, you can use the close friends option to choose which of your followers can see the story. Why limit your story to your Insta followers only when you can reach friends on multiple platforms by sharing your Instagram story straight to your Facebook story.
All videos and images posted to story disappear after 24 hours, but only you can access them from your private archive. If you want a fantastic story to stick around indefinitely, you can show select stories permanently as “highlights” on your profile page. Another way is to save stories to your phone’s photo library, in order to store them permanently or share the content with some other social media platform. You can either save each video or image separately or download the entire story as a single video. However, while saving your own stories is a walk in the park, saving someone else’s story is another story.
For images, the most hassle-free way of saving an image story is to take screenshots. The key to taking perfect Instagram screenshots is to hold your finger on the screen, on the image that you want to capture, to stop the story from progressing. This also clears away the user interface elements to help you get a clean capture that doesn’t look like a screenshot. However, video stories are a whole different matter and can’t simply be saved with screenshots. Depending on your OS, you would need third party apps to be able to save other people’s videos.
However, until you have a genuine reason to save someone’s story, it’s better not to do so without their permission, especially if you are planning to repost it in your own story or feed or show it to others. Regardless of the method you use to save a story, it is still not an ethical practice.
iOS
iPhone users can download video stories by downloading ‘Repost Story for Instagram’. The app is pretty easy to use. All you have to do is to look up an Instagram username and grant the app access to your photo library. And the best part, if you don’t want your crush to know you are stalking their stories, you can use the app to watch Stories anonymously. Its Story Creator tool is also great for recreating and posting your old videos and photos with a new date stamp.
Android
Story Saver is an amazing Android app, which can be downloaded for free if you wish to save other people’s video stories. To get started, you have to log into your Instagram account. While the main page only displays stories posted by your followers, you can look up other users in the search bar and check out their stories. Select the video or photo that you want and tap on save. The photo will be saved automatically in the Story Saver folder in your photo gallery.
Desktop
If you want to save stories to your laptop computer, a lot of websites can help. For instance, you can to use StoryDownloader, a website dedicated to the task, as well other apps such as Weynstag, StoriesIG, or StorySaver. All you have to at these downloaders sites is to simply enter a username and it will bring up a grid of that user’s current stories. Tap the download button to save it to your computer.
