Snapchat has always prided itself on real-time sharing. That’s why the app opens to the camera: it’s designed to get you sharing whatever is happening in the moment. That’s why, until today, snaps posted from your camera roll got a white border around them. It was a subtle cue from the app that older photos and videos are considered second-class citizens inside Snapchat. But as of today, that’s going away.
An update to Snapchat rolling out today removes the white border. Snaps posted from the camera roll will now appear however they appear when you first snapped them. The technology isn’t perfect, though — horizontal photos get rotated when you import them into Snapchat, and there’s no way to straighten them out. Instagram, which never added a border to old photos and videos, retains their proper orientation. (Though it does awkwardly crop them, for now at least.)
The company tells me removing the border was an aesthetic choice. It also looks like a move to keep pace with Instagram, which is growing faster and had a more liberal policy around posting older items. On Snapchat, snaps posted from the camera roll or its Memories archive will be tagged “From Camera Roll” and “From Memories.”
The update also added a new option for saving inside chats. If you long-press on a text chat, you now see an option to copy the text as well as to save it. The update also added the ability to see your friends on the Snap Map inside a group chat, assuming they have shared their location.
The update is now live on iOS. It does not appear to have rolled out yet on Android.