Meta is working on making it possible for you to scale Instagram stories with pinches

Zooming in on Instagram Stories with the familiar pinch gesture will make it easier to see tiny text and see the details of images in people’s Stories up close.

• What’s happening? Instagram is working on the ability to zoom stories.
• Why care? You can finally zoom in on tiny text and other hard-to-see details in these loaded Instagram stories using the familiar pinch gesture.
• What to do? Maybe stop posting stories with tons of text…

Instagram Stories zoom feature is in development

Mobile developer and reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi discovered support for scaling Instagram stories in the app code. He was able to get the feature to work by demonstrating it with a video posted through his Twitter profile.

Instagram has always supported the ability to zoom in on images posted to the feed. The addition of zoom support for stories is a much needed improvement.

Paluzzi also shared in another Twitter post that you’ll be able to react to stories posted on Valentine’s Day by choosing from half a dozen different heart emojis.

#Instagram is working on the ability to pinch Stories to zoom ? pic.twitter.com/bWe5m2bPOB

— Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) February 5, 2023

What is the benefit of scaling stories on Instagram?

I, for one, will gladly zoom in on most of the stories I come across on Instagram. Even if you have perfect eyesight, many Instagram stories are hard to read.

It is not your fault; this is because some people tend to litter their stories with a lot of text. It’s fitness trainers posting weekly workout routines, foodies posting lengthy recipes, and people with too much free time sharing complex thoughts—all on one screen using tiny, hard-to-read text.

The problem is not just cramming too much text into one story. Many people only share media in their stories, but I still need to zoom in on a specific detail due to poor quality due to Instagram’s heavy compression.

In all of these cases, the ability to easily scale up stories comes in handy.

When will Meta release this feature?

Either way, it looks like one of those features that Instagram should have had from the start. The Signal app, for example, has supported zooming in stories since the first time it debuted the Stories feature.

It’s not yet clear when Instagram might launch this feature. It shouldn’t be long considering Instagram’s story scaling seems to be in testing right now.

Some people have admitted on social media that they have been playing with this feature in the last few days.