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Instagram will now let you upload 10 photos at once

The new “photo carousels” are meant to encourage more posting.

Instagram

How do you get people to share more photos? You simply let them share more photos.

That’s the approach Instagram is taking with its newest feature, photo and video carousels, which let users share up to 10 pictures or videos at once. The carousels will feature the first photo or video of the group in your Instagram feed just like other posts, but allow users to swipe to the left or right to see other content uploaded in the same batch.

As Instagram explained it in a company blog post Wednesday: “You no longer have to choose the single best photo or video from an experience you want to remember.”

In other words, Instagram wants to lower the bar for what users consider to be “Instagram worthy.” The company has spent the past year trying to come up with ways to increase sharing and decrease pressure around posting to a feed full of people’s most highly curated moments.

That was one of the key reasons Instagram launched Stories, the photo and video montages that disappear after 24 hours. The company realized in late 2015 that the quality of photos shared to the main feed was actually turning people away.

As Kevin Weil, Instagram’s head of product, explained it to Recode in an interview last December: “[Instagram] became a place where people kept raising the bar on themselves in terms of the quality of what they had to achieve to post. We didn’t want that.”

So Instagram is lowering that bar, first with Stories and now with carousels.

There is a business benefit to user carousels, too: More room for advertiser content. Marketers could already buy carousel ads inside Instagram, but now those ads can include up to 10 photos or videos — the previous limit was five. So giving users more space to share photos also means giving advertisers more space to share ads.

The new feature will roll out to Instagram users worldwide beginning Wednesday.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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