Instagram now lets you reply to stories with photos and videos

Instagram’s rapid fire updates to its Stories feature continues today with the added ability to respond to individual stories with photos, videos, and Boomerangs.

With today’s update, a camera icon now appears right beside the text box at the bottom of each story. After tapping it, Instagram’s camera will come up and let you craft a reply just like it were any other story entry, complete with face filters, stickers, hashtags, and so on. In a neat touch, a still of the story you’re replying to will appear on top of your photo, and you’ll be able to reposition it just like a sticker, sizing it up and down and spinning it around.

The update doesn’t present a huge new feature on its own, but it very much sounds like something that could kick off a whole lot more engagement with Instagram Stories. As Snapchat has shown, people love to send goofy photos back and forth, and this new feature helps to enable that. The update also shows Instagram pushing ahead with the format that Snapchat pioneered: while people can send snaps back and forth to one another, Snapchat Stories can only be replied to with text right now.