Snapchat’s new Lens Explorer will let you browse thousands of community filters

At the end of last year, Snapchat introduced a way for people to build their own lenses. Today Snapchat is introducing a new way to find those lenses inside the app. Lens Explorer, as it’s known, will showcase the best of developers’ lenses in a variety of ways. The explorer will be available only on iOS for now, the company said.

Lens Explorer will appear in the carousel of lenses that pops up when you tap the camera screen. You’ll then be able to browse some of the more than 100,000 lenses created to date, as well as being able to view public stories that have been created using them. If you like one, you can swipe up on a snap and unlock it for your own use.

The feed of lenses will be personalized to you based on factors including location. No sponsored lenses will appear in the explorer, at least for now, Snap said.

Highlighting lenses within the app should give developers more incentive to create one — even if they still have no way of making money from them. The company has courted developers with an “official lens creators program” that offers tech support and unspecified “revenue opportunities.”

Lenses built using Snap’s Lens Studio tool have been viewed more than 2.5 billion times, the company said.

Correction, 1:27 p.m.: This article originally said Facebook does not have a third-party platform for building augmented reality effects. In fact, it does.