Life

How To Tell If You Have Snapchat Geostickers

by Georgina Lawton

Social media has never been hotter than right now, and Snapchat is the latest platform to up its game with the introduction of Geostickers. The caveat is that not everyone has access to the new feature yet — so how can you tell if you have Snapchat Geostickers? Right now, the answer is actually pretty straightforward: If you live in one of the 10 cities in which they've been rolled out, then you've got access to them. According to a post on the Snapchat blog, those 10 cities are: Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Washington DC, Honolulu, London, Sydney, São Paulo, Paris, and Riyadh. Are you currently in one of those places? Congratulations! As of Tuesday, Aug. 2, you are able to enjoy Snapchat Geostickers. And if you aren't in one of those places? Well, you'll just have to wait — either until you can travel to one of them, or until they're arrived in more places.

Geostickers are cartoon pictures similar to emoji, except they're bigger and change in appearance depending on where you are. So if you're in, say, New York, you'll see yellow taxis and Pizza Rat; meanwhile, if you're in Paris, you'll see cute little sloths hanging off of the Eiffel Tower. According to Venturebeat, you can insert multiple Geostickers into your Snaps; you can even send them via Snapchat direct messaging too, meaning that even the most emoji-shy among us will find a way to use them. Worth noting, though, is that because they're location specific, you won't be able to access the Geostickers for a particular city if you leave the area — and indeed, you might even lose the ability to use them all together depending on where you go, since not all cities have them. And if you're lucky to inhabit one of these Snapchat-approved cities, don't forget that in order to enjoy this new feature, you've got to enable your location services. After you do that, though, it's all systems go.

As you can see from the images below, the New York City Geostickers include a myriad of famous iconography associated with the place: A yellow cab, a pretzel, and a big apple (I see what you did there) are among the cartoon images you can send to your friends when you're in the area. And if you look at the sticker menu at the bottom of the image, you can also see a highlight location icon. If you have access to Geostickers, this icon indicates where in the sticker menu you can find them.

If you're not in a location with Geostickers, though (or if you turn off location services), that icon will disappear, meaning you do not have access to them right at that moment:

Snapchat have diversified a lot recently with the recent introduction of the face paint lens and personalized emojis, known as Bitmoji; it's innovations like these which continue to set the social media platform apart. One thing's for certain: There's so much choice in how we express ourselves and communicate with each through social media right now. What a time to be alive, right?

Images: Hannah Caldwell, Lucia Peters/Bustle