Here's How To Tag People In Instagram Galleries

Widely revered as the gold standard for bite-sized online artistic expression through photos, Instagram has, since its inception, encouraged users to carefully curate their pages. With its newest feature, though, the site is giving users a way to show off more photos and videos without becoming the friend everyone wants to unfollow for clogging up their feeds. And that means that more of your friends and family members will make it onto your 'Gram when you document every vacation or Sunday brunch — so the site is rolling out a tool to allow users to include multiple photos and videos in one post. Given how essential the new update it, it's definitely important to know how to tag people in an Instagram gallery before uploading your very first slideshow within the app.

Instagram announced its new gallery-like feature in a blog post Wednesday, adding a major incentive for users to download the Instagram latest update, 10.9 for iOS, ASAP. Once you do, you'll soon have the option to include up to ten photos and videos to a single post (some users will have it as early as Wednesday; others over the next few weeks). So, as the post explains, your followers can experience "favorite moments of your best friend’s surprise birthday party, from setting up to when they walk through the door." Or, if you're the foodie type, you can provide "a step-by-step cake recipe" with all the elements contained in one post.

And being able to tell a story with the slideshow, rather than sharing just one or two photos or videos the old-fashioned, one-per-post way of the original Insta, guarantees that more members of your crew will make appearances. Luckily, tagging them in the gallery is pretty much as simple as creating it in the first place. After selecting the photos or videos to include from your phone's library and applying filters either to each one individually or to the whole bunch at once, simply tap "tag people." While the feature allows for only one location and caption, users can tag people in every photo. Still, commenters' feedback will appear below the entire post instead of being applied to one photo.

And voilá — once the gallery is posted, followers will see four blue dots along the bottom, according to Refinery29. This will let them know that they can swipe through the slideshow. The entire experience, Instagram product manager Yichen Wang told the outlet "adds depth to those moments" that users share with the tool. And it's about time that the masses had the chance to tell their stories in this more multi-dimensional way: The gallery feature has been a mainstay for advertisers for a while.

With the gallery feature, Instagram is positioning itself as a "lifestyle platform," as Wired's David Pierce wrote. Because people's lives aren't simply snapshots here and there, but an endless sequence of events and experiences shared with others, constantly — both in real life and online.