Instagram Just Launched A New Way To Share Multiple Photos In Your Stories

With the holidays coming up, you might be looking forward to all that time you get to spend with family and friends — or you might just be thinking about how much prime cookie-baking, holiday sweater-wearing, egg nog-drinking content you'll be able to post on Instagram over the next few weeks. Fans of creative holiday content will be happy to know there's a new feature to mess around with on Instagram. Even better, learning how to use Layout in Instagram Stories will take you no more than a few seconds.

The new Instagram feature launched on Dec. 17. The social media platform announced the news in a tweet that read, "Strike a pose. And another pose. And then another. With Layout, you can now capture and share multiple photos in your story — a new, creative way to express yourself. Check it out!" (If the feature sounds familiar, it might be because you might already have the Layout from Instagram app downloaded to collage your feed pics; the app is totally separate from the Instagram stories feature.)

Here's how you use the Layout feature: when you use Stories, you'll see an option for Layout in between Boomerang and Superzoom. Once you click that option, you'll see there are five photo collage templates to choose from, depending on how many photos you want to include in the layout. You can included as many as six different photos in a single post, or as few as two.

There are examples of each of the layouts available shown in the Twitter video above. Though you can't yet edit each photo individually, you do still have the option of layering words, stickers, or .gifs on top of the Layout, like you do with a regular Instagram Story post. Now that you can create multi-photo posts within the Instagram app itself, it'll be that much easier to show off your creativity without switching between multiple apps.

Instagram has been releasing a number of new features over the last several months. For example, the recent release of the Create mode on Instagram allows people to make posts without any photos or videos in the background. There's also a new tool that encourages users to re-think a photo caption for an Instagram post if it's similar to other captions that have been reported as inappropriate in the past.

You can start using Layout right away, if it seems like an interesting feature to you. Might as well get the hang of it before your office holiday party.