How To Use Instagram Stickers On Photos

2016 has been a pretty lousy year for most, but Instagram seems to have taken the year to try to reinvent themselves. The photo sharing app has been taking some cues from Snapchat, adding tons of new features, including stickers for Instagram Stories. With this clever workaround, you can also use stickers on your regular Instagram photos. Here's how to use Instagram stickers on photos, because why limit them to just your story?

While Instagram has always been more about photo sharing, Snapchat became popular for providing many more options besides still photography. With fun filters for images and videos, Snapchat has become popular in part because it's fun to use. Unsurprisingly Instagram, arguably Snapchat's biggest social network competitor, has been trying to figure out how to stay relevant. So far, Instagram has been pretty unapologetically taking ideas straight from Snapchat's playbook, and the two apps are beginning to feel really similar. But, Instagram is still primarily a photo sharing app.

While stickers are technically available on Instagram in the spot where you'd find adjustments and filters, there is technically a way to upload photos to your stream that have stickers on them from Instagram Stories. It just takes a little work:

Take a photo in Instagram the same as you would if you were going to add it to Stories. Then, proceed to the Sticker button in the upper right hand corner.

Instagram still has a collection of holiday-themed stickers available, which will probably be around until after the New Year at least. Scrolling down, you'll get to all the emoji stickers which are likely to be the main offerings of Instagram's sticker feature.

When you're done stickering your photo, instead of hitting the arrow in the lower left corner to send it your Story, go to the lower left hand side and hit Save. This will save the sticker-fied photo to your phone's photo gallery.

Head back to your Instagram stream and proceed as if you were going to put up a new photo. Instead of taking a photo with the app, go to Gallery in the lower left hand corner and you should see the photos you've saved. If you don't, it's probably because your app is defaulting to finding photos from another place on your phone, like your camera roll or screenshots folder. In the upper left hand corner, you can select where you want to pull photos from — make sure it's set to gallery!

When you've chosen the photo you saved from Stories, you can continue on editing just like you would a regular photo! You can, of course, always just take a screenshot of your creation, but having the option to Save the photo, then upload it into Instagram's editor, doesn't really take anymore time. Whether you're pulling from photos saved to your Gallery or looking for a screenshot, the process would be similar. Although sometimes taking a screenshot on your phone can be a real pain, so this workaround at least doesn't require you to have to push several buttons simultaneously, try to or figure out where your phone decided to save that screenshot.

No word on whether Instagram has any plans to add the features it has brought to Stories to the traditional Instagram experience, but for now this workaround will at least allows you to get those very important emoji stickers 🎉 on all your New Year's Eve photos.