Instagram has achieved in a matter of a short time reach the 700 million users with a series of novelties among which “Instagram Stories”. Videos and images that are part of ‘your story’ for 24 hours and that any of your contacts can see.

This popularity has meant that every time we see more people approach the virtues and benefits of this social network , when before they had not planned to do so. An Instagram that has gained in complexity over time and that we unravel in this publication that will make you an expert in five minutes.

Minute one: basic notions

Instagram is the social network par excellence for photography, although in a short time it has taken another quite different aspect to include the video from different formats.

This app is divided into five well differentiated categories that are available from the lower toolbar where you can find the timeline (drawn with the house icon), the search engine, upload a gallery / photo / video, what they do your followers and profile.

The timeline is the main part of Instagram from which you can see all the publications and that will make you feel at home, since it has many similar to the own Facebook.

In this very important part of the application, you will find the ‘stories’ at the top, the direct access to the camera app in the upper left corner and the icon located on the opposite side to access the messages we receive or send In a direct way.

The ‘hashtags’ on Instagram are very important and it is from the search tab where we can find the content that interests us thanks to them. Simply put ‘photo’ in the search engine and select the pad of the four options, to quickly find the most popular hashtags such as: #photo, #photo or #photos. You press on one of them, and a huge amount of images related to those hashtags will appear. You are facing one of the ‘powers’ of this social network of photography.

Minute two: uploading content to your account

Another of the powers granted by Instagram is the upload of content to your account. From the central button at the bottom of the app, we select the upload and immediately access the capture or taking of images that we have in the internal memory of the phone.

You have three options: gallery, photos and video. The first one allows you to select a specific number of images to make a kind of slideshow, the second an image to pass it to your timeline and the third one to capture a video.

When we take a photo and a video, we will move on to one of the most important Instagram moments : the editing and publication of content. We have the option to apply a filter to leave more “cool” the photo or video, access a series of basic editions (cropped, brightness and more) and the configuration of the publication.

Being Instagram a ‘hashtags’ app is important that if you want to get the attention of the community of this app, use some in the caption. Although if you want to leave privately, it is better to use them, since anyone could see them, as long as you have the account as public.

We finish with the option to add location, tag people to the ‘Facebook’ and the possibility of sharing that publication in other networks such as Facebook itself if we have linked the account.

That said, when you get used to driving with Instagram, it would be interesting to always use this app to upload photos to your Facebook account and thus separate the content.

Minute three: The ‘Instagram Stories’

This functionality has given ‘wings’ to Instagram so that more and more people will start their journey in this social network.

With ‘Instagram Stories’ you can capture images and videos that you will upload to the social network and that will remain for 24 hours so they can be seen by any of your contacts.

Located at the top of the timeline, you can see the ‘stories’ of other contacts by clicking on them. With a quick press you go to the next ‘storie’ of the contact, while with a lateral gesture you can move on to the next or previous contact.

The way to create them is very simple from the icon “your story” or the camera button in the timeline so that, when you have made the photo or the video capture, use the button of your story again to share that content as a ‘Instagram storie’.

They can be customized with emojis, freehand drawing, location widgets or include text, just as you can activate the sound if you want. Instagram usually adds new personalization options every so often to praise this type of content that is having great reception.

Remember that you can always save those videos made both in the internal storage and pass them to your profile to have them always there.

Minute four: live broadcasts

On Instagram you can make a real-time broadcast so that all your contacts can access it directly. It is one of the functions that increasingly has a greater use and which is accessed from the same camera button in the timeline.

With a left lateral gesture we can go to the live broadcast with a welcome screen that warns that we will enter into that special format. It is recommended that we have a good 4G or WiFi connection so that the experience is appropriate.

The moment it starts, all our contacts will receive a notification of warning so they can jump to it from the status bar.

Instagram was updated in the month of March with the possibility that you can save the retransmissions for have them in the internal memory of your mobile and you can upload it back to your Instagram account if you wish.

Minute five: create collections of publications marked as favorites

Recently Instagram was updated with the possibility of saving publications as favorites. Even now you can create ‘collections’ that allow you to have all that content stored in one of the tabs we have in our profile (just the one on the right).

We take a publication of a contact, click on the save icon and we will have that publication marked as a favorite. If we already want to create a collection, we must make a long press on the same button in the publication so that the ‘New collection’ window appears.

We put the desired name, in this case ‘Art Gallery’, and it will be saved in the custom collection. Every time we go to save a favorite, we will have the collections created to assign them quickly and without wasting any time.