How to Navigate Instagram Stories: Skip, Rewind, Pause, Re-post, and Respond.

At one point, Instagram  simplest of all social media out there. There were no sponsored posts and, most notably, there were no Stories.

Instagram actually made quite a bold introducing the Stories feature. There were a lot of people who thought it ludicrous, but it is now evident that they made a good call, as everyone uses stories today. With so many stories out there to go about, you’ll want to be able to pause a story, either to take a better look at it or to take your eyes off the screen for a moment.

Instagram Stories

On Instagram, you’ll find yourself spending a lot of time scrolling through people’s Stories. Having to watch all of them every day might be somewhat excessive, but this is exactly what Instagram wants – the more Stories you view, the more other users will be inclined to post them.

Skipping and Rewinding and Instagram Story

If you are an Instagram user who scrolls through stories only to make sure that you’ve “seen” them all, you probably know that tapping the right part of your screen will just skip through each item in a Story. Tapping the left part of the screen will, of course, take you to the previous photo or video, while swiping from right to left will take you to the next user’s Story.

Pausing and Rewinding an Instagram Story

If you need to take your eyes off the screen while watching a Story, tap the screen anywhere and don’t release. When you want the story to continue, simply lift your finger.

Re-posting an Instagram Story

Instagram is all about the visuals and you’ll want your posts and Stories to look the best they can. Re-posting Stories is a popular thing on the platform. It’s like retweeting, but with Stories. However, in order to have a simple option to click ‘re-post’ and be done with it, you’d have to be tagged in the Story. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case with Stories that you want to re-post, especially if we’re talking about celebrities.

Taking a screenshot is a legitimate way of reposting a Story. However, if you land your finger anywhere on the screen to see the Story, you’ll see that the user who posted it will be essentially watermarked, as well as the Send message bar and the story “timers” at the top of the screen. What many Instagram users don’t know is that taking an ideal, clean screenshot of a Story is very easy. Just be careful when tapping the screen not to move it, and you’ll see everything but the story itself will disappear.

Responding to an Instagram Story

This isn’t the most advanced and useful way of pausing a Story, but when you swipe up or tap the Send message bar, the story will pause and your keyboard will show up. Of course, this isn’t convenient for screenshots and usually doesn’t work if you want to take your time to see the actual content, as the background is dimmed and the keyboard covers nearly half the screen.

However, this way to pause a Story is useful because it allows you to send a direct response to the poster of the story. By tapping the bottom of the screen, or swiping up, you can send a message or an emoji response to the poster.

Tagged Photos

Yes, this is an even stranger way to pause a Story, but people do tag other people on the Stories feature. You’ll recognize the tags by the “@” in front of a username. Just tap on any tag on a story and a small card will appear above the name, not even dimming the story’s background or covering a large part of the screen with a keyboard.

However, not all photos feature tagged users, which doesn’t really make this a good solution, but rather a hack for the Instagram-savvy people who know what to tap and when at all times.

Double-Tap on iPhone

This solution may be a bit ‘out there’, but if you are an iPhone owner, there is another hack that you can use to essentially pause a Story. You should double-tap the home button to bring up the active app list and find the Instagram app without tapping on it.

Navigating Instagram Stories is a Skill

Funny as it may sound, the more you use the Stories feature on Instagram, the better at it you become. You’ll learn how to pause, when, and where in no-time.

How do you pause an Instagram Story? Do you use more than one way to do it? Type a comment in the section below and let’s start a discussion.