New Blood Entry — Living Memories
In response to the massive loss of life due to the Covid-19 crisis, Snapchat wants to spread kindness by honouring the memories of those who are no longer with us. With Snapchat Living Memories users can grow their own AR tree in memory of their lost loved ones, and watch it flourish with photos reminding them of all the good times they shared together. Encouraging Users to come together in remembrance and help each other lighten the burden of such a heavy loss.
Snapchat introduces Memories: a searchable, shareable archive of your snaps
By Casey Newton , a contributing editor who has been writing about tech for over 10 years. He founded Platformer, a newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.
Jul 6, 2016, 4:00 PM UTC | Comments
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At a time when its social networking rivals are racing to promote more real-time sharing, Snapchat is turning its attention to the past. The company today introduced Memories, a way of saving and sharing old snaps in a private archive inside the main app. It’s a living, social camera roll in which photos and videos can be organized, edited, and shared long after they are taken. The introduction of Memories represents a significant shift for the famously ephemeral Snapchat — and reflects the app’s growing status as the default camera for millions of users.
Memories, which begins rolling out today on Snapchat for Android and iOS, is a new section of the app that you access by swiping up from the camera screen. In the past, you’ve been able to save your photos, videos, and stories from Snapchat to your phone’s camera roll. («Stories,» of course, are what Snapchat calls the rolling 24-hour collection of photos and videos that you take throughout the day.) Now you can save them to Snapchat’s servers as well, and revisit them later in the Memories section of the app.
A significant shift for the famously ephemeral app
Open Memories and you’ll find your saved snaps in reverse-chronological order. Rectangular posts are individual snaps; circular posts represent stories, and offer live previews of the snaps they contain. Memories also contains tabs for viewing just snaps, just stories, or your phone’s complete camera roll. From any of these tabs, tap and hold a snap to enable a variety of new interactions: You can edit the snap, adding geofilters and timestamps even if you’re far from where and when you took it. You can share it to your current story, where it will appear with a white frame and timestamp to indicate it’s an older snap. Or you can select multiple photos to create a new story, which you can then send to friends as an attachment inside a message.
A search feature allows you to find photos based on when and where they were taken. Search will show you snaps on their anniversary dates, a la Timehop. And the company has built object recognition into search, and can detect «hundreds» of objects to start with: sunsets, surfing, the ocean, and so on. But the object recognition is done on your phone, not in Snapchat’s cloud, for an additional layer of privacy.
Memories also includes a section called «My Eyes Only» where you can put embarrassing or explicit snaps that might accidentally kill your grandma, if she ever saw them. You have to type in a PIN code to access those memories, and if you forget your PIN, Snapchat won’t recover the images. The company says Memories started from the observation that people often tell stories in person by physically sharing their phones with one another, letting them swipe through photos of a vacation, or prom, or some other event. My Eyes Only is meant to allow people to share their phones with one another more comfortably.
At a high level, Memories represents one of the biggest changes to Snapchat in the company’s 5-year history. The app’s disappearing messages encourage users to share more candid glimpses of their lives than they might elsewhere. At its best, Snapchat has felt like the most authentic social network — and that has been driven in large part by the fact that users feel safer sharing there, because there is no permanent record of their activity.
Snapchat is increasingly used to film major milestones in people’s lives
At the same time, the app’s reported 150 million daily users increasingly use it to film major milestones in their lives. They’re capturing graduations, family vacations, engagements, and weddings — for which they’ve designed custom geofilters for their friends and families to use. Those are moments that many people want to remember, and saving them to the smartphone camera roll is an imperfect solution. Phones get lost or stolen; photos and videos fail to back up; and what does get saved is often buried under an avalanche of new photos, making old moments hard to find. (Apple is attempting to address some of these issues with a product of its own, also called Memories, in iOS 10.)
Given Snapchat’s continued growth, the release of Memories will likely raise questions about what it means for Instagram and its corporate parent, Facebook. Recent reports in The Information have suggested that both products have seen a modest decline in the volume of posts that people are sharing, and Facebook has become notably more aggressive in recent months in suggesting things for users to post. Photos remain one of the two or three most powerful tools to turn people into daily users of social networks, and many will likely prefer Snapchat’s private archive of photos to Facebook’s publicly browsable one.
How To View Memories on Snapchat
Dave Johnson Dave Johnson is a dedicated writer with a strong focus on the ever-evolving social media landscape. Leveraging his comprehensive understanding of these platforms, he breaks down the complexities of social media apps to provide engaging and insightful content. Read more September 1, 2023
On Snapchat, videos and pics are only viewable for 24 hours. But you may want to access these posts after they expire, and thankfully Snapchat has a cool feature that allows its users to store and view their snapshots and story memories and even repost these time machine Snaps again. In this article, we explain what memories are and how you can check out those long-gone Snaps.
How to View Your Memories on Snapchat
If you’re feeling nostalgic and want to dive down memory lane, you’d probably love the Snapchat memory feature. Here you can find all previously shared content. Here’s how to do this:
- Open Snapchat and log in.
- In your camera screen, select your “Cards” icon.
- Your “Memories” will pop up, and you can see Stories, Screenshots, Snaps, Camera Roll, My Eyes Only, etc.
What Exactly Are Memories on Snapchat?
In Snapchat, the combined snaps that are saved on the Snapchat server are your memories. Snapchat gives you the option to view these memories, share them or make them private.
Save Your Snapchat Stories to Memories Automatically
Whenever you create your Snap, you are given options on where to save it. You could decide this for every individual Snap, or you could just set it to save to your memories automatically. To save your Snapchat stories automatically to memories, do this:
- Tap on your “Profile Pic.”
- Click on the “Gear” icon.
- Find the “Memories” option.
- Select the “Auto-Save My Story Snap” option.
- Choose “Auto-Save to Memories.”
How to Share Your Memories of Snaps and Stories
Some of your favorite old posts can be reshared using Snapchat memories. This is a popular, regularly used feature on Snapchat. To share your juicy memories of stories or Snaps, do this:
- Click on the “Cards” icon, or from your camera screen, scroll up.
- Find the story/snap you’d like to share and open it.
- Click on “Send” from your menu options, and you can send it to friends by choosing which ones you want to send it to and clicking on “Send.”
- To send it to your story, click on “My Story” from the send menu options.
- Click on “Add,” which confirms the action.
Make a Quick Story from Your Snapchat Memories
To make a quick story using the memories on Snapchat, do this:
- Go to your “Memories” by swiping up from your Camera screen.
- Click on the Snaps you’d like to use to make your story.
- Click on “Create” and then name your story.
Keep Your Memories on Snapchat Private
You may not want your friends or followers to see your memories and prefer they remain private. To do this, you’d have to move your Snapchat memories to My Eyes Only. When you browse through memories, those Snaps will not show. Here’s how to make your Snaps on Snapchat private:
- On your camera screen, scroll up to view your memories.
- Find and choose the Snap you want to make private.
- Open the Snap, tap and hold for a few seconds.
- Choose “My Eyes Only.”
- To change a private Snap to being viewable again, open the Snap from your “My Eyes Only” and then choose “Unhide.”
If it’s the first time you are adding a snap to your My Eyes Only, you’ll be asked to add a four-digit passcode to secure your privacy. Be sure to choose something you won’t forget.
Recover Deleted Snaps on Snapchat
One common way of making more space on your mobile is to delete your pictures and videos. If, however, you deleted a memory in Snapchat in error, you can recover it, as it won’t be permanently gone. To get any deleted memory back on Snapchat, do this:
- Select your “Profile Page.”
- Click on the “Gear” icon.
- Find and select “My Data.”
- Find and click on “Submit Request” on your “Download My Data” page.
- Snapchat will send you an email.
- From your email, open the link and download all your Snapchat memory data.
Note that this only works if the Auto-Save option has been turned on in your settings.
If You Can’t Find Some of Your Snapchat Memories
When any of your Snapchat memories are missing, this could be because you’re running out of storage. Try doing the following steps to see if your memories will pop up:
- Update your Snapchat app to the latest version via App Store or Google Play Store.
- Open the Snapchat app.
- Tap on the “Gear” icon in your profile and click on “Settings.”
- Find the option to “Clear Cache.”
- Click on “Clear All” on iOS, or if using Android, click on “Continue.” Note that clearing the cache doesn’t delete chats, memories, or Snaps.
- Switch your phone off for about a minute, and then switch it back on.
Make sure that you back up your chat memories before logging out of your Snapchat account, logging into Snapchat from a different phone, or uninstalling the Snapchat app. Do this because otherwise, you won’t be able to find any memories that were not backed up.
Perform a Search in Your Snapchat Memories
The memories feature in Snapchat has a Smart Search tool to help you find the specific Snap you want. To do this:
- Go to your “Memories” by swiping up from your Camera screen.
- Click on the “Magnifying Glass” seen at the top of the screen.
- Choose from the suggested categories, or you can type a keyword to search.
- To exit, swipe down.
Importing Snaps from Your Camera Roll into Your Memories
If you’ve saved Snaps to your camera roll and you’d like them to feature in your memories, do this:
- Click on the “Gear” icon from your profile and select “Settings.”
- Find and click on “Memories.”
- Select “Save Button.”
- Choose a Snap you’d like to import.
Flashback Memories on Snapchat
With Snapchat’s flashback memories, you can tease your nostalgia bug and see all your best moments from the previous year. Flashback memories on Snapchat come up as a Featured Story in your Memories if the Snap was saved at least a year to the day. This flashback can be shared with your friends, and you can save it to your phone. Any posts you saved in your My Eyes Only won’t be shown as a Flashback.
View or Share Your Fab Snapchat Memories
We all love diving down memory lane and re-sharing those extra special posts. Snapchat memories are a great way to find, share or hide your favorite old Snaps and stories. If you never want your stories to disappear after the 24-hour time-lapse, you can set your Snapchat account to automatically add every post to your memories for you to access and re-share whenever you’d like.
Did you find it easy to follow the above steps to find and share your memories or to set your posts to automatically be saved to memories? Let us know in the comments below.
Snapchat launches Memories and Explore Layers on Snap Map
Snapchat announced earlier this year that it would add Layers to Snap Map, making the social product more interactive. Today, the app is launching its first two layers: Memories and Explore.
The Snap Map has been used to show people where their friends are currently located (if they opt-in to location sharing), interesting places to visit and which areas are most popular among Snapchatters. Memories will show you old Snapchats that you sent from particular places — so, if you browse your map and zoom in on Central Park, you might find a picture you took last year of a cute dog in the park. Memories are private and only available to the individual user — you can’t see friends’ memories.
Explore reimagines the heat map, which shows activity by relative volume on the Snap Map. You can tap on highlighted regions to see public photos and videos submitted by Snapchat users around the world.
Image Credits: Snapchat
These layers are designed to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, rather than crowding a ton of information into one map. Snap’s partners like Ticketmaster and The Infatuation are also developing layers, which would show users where nearby events are happening, or which restaurants are most popular among Snapchatters. The app also added a My Places feature this summer, which recommended to users places to visit based on where they’ve been, where their friends have been and which places other Snapchat users visit most.
To access Layers, users can navigate to the Snap Map and tap the button for a Layers menu in the upper-right corner of the map. Then, they can toggle between various layers to access what they’re looking for.
These features are available now for Snapchat users on iOS and Android.