Lately, there has been a ton of noise being made around the app called ‘Stories’ by Instagram. People are putting Stories at the forefront of their marketing efforts. I have also seen my friends upload their stories onto their IG profile instead of posting photos onto it. With this buzz, “Stories” is gaining more steam daily with its user base growing at a fast pace. Here are apps for your stories:
Adobe Spark Post
One of the most popular apps for Instagram Stories, Adobe Spark Post is a huge tool in the Insta community – and it’s not hard to see why. For starters, the app is super easy to use. Just tap on the green ‘+’ sign at the bottom of the screen and choose your background image (it can be a solid colour, patterns or a photo). Next, select the the Instagram Story size. Then you have the freedom to add whatever you like: text, GIFs, icons.. genius!http
Adobe Spark Post and Video apps are great for creating Instagram Stories. The Spark family of apps allows users to add video clips or combine pictures to make a video Story. It can also be used to add effects to pictures. There are several sounds, fonts, animations, and other design effects that you can add.
The app is easy to use and does not require any design expertise. You can add effects from a huge collection available on the app. For video Stories, sounds can be added either from the app collection or from your own phone. The app also has a myriad of themes available for different types of Stories and messages.
The app supports Android, iOS, and desktop platforms.
Key Features:
- Creates animated video posts
- Beautiful typography options
- Multiple text cutouts, layouts, and text effects
- Millions of stock photos to choose from
- Cloud backup allows easy syncing
You have the option to change the layout so your creativity can be tweaked for any platform, which is very handy when you’re sharing content everywhere from Snapchat to Facebook. We love the animated effects for an extra dose of individuality. Or, if you want a quick template to work with, just choose from one of the many in-built layouts and be guided by the suggested colour palettes.
If it’s a video Story you want, great! This app is brill for adding video clips, combining pictures or adding sounds, including your own voice. Then, once you’re ready to share, you can post it directly to Instagram with just one tap. Or save to your camera roll for uploading later. It’s a real game-changer.
InShot
This video and photo editor app is one of the best apps to create Instagram Stories. This brilliant app provides a plethora of easy-to-use design features to help you create beautiful Instagram Stories.
The InShot video editor has a range of features and allows you to trim, cut, split, crop, or merge videos. It also provides various video backgrounds, filters, and effects. You can also add music and sounds to your videos, with an option to fade music in and out. There is an option for speed control using which you can make slow-motion or fast videos. You can also manage a video’s aspect ratio to make it fit different platforms.
The app also comes with text, stickers, emojis, and other design effects that can be added to both photos and videos.
InShot is a great app for amateurs and professionals alike. With so many video and photo editing features, this app has everything you need to create Instagram Stories.
Key Features:
- Speed-control, blur, split, and merge tools for videos
- Video converter
- Collage maker and photo editor
- Option to add music to videos
- Filters, effects, texts, icons, and other photo and video enhancement tools
This app is available for both Android and iOS devices and is one of the highest-rated apps on both platforms.
Unfold
Okay, this may be one of our favourite apps for Instagram Stories yet. What’s so smart about this one is you can preview your story with ‘Story mode’, giving you the chance to see how numerous pages will look together. You can then share the complete story (or just part of it) directly to Instagram or save to your camera roll.
This Instagram Stories editor has some free and some premium features. The app provides minimalistic, elegant templates for creating beautiful Instagram Stories. It supports both photo and video stories and has plenty of design options for each.
The app doesn’t require users to set up an account. You can simply download the app and start creating and sharing high-resolution Instagram Stories.
Key Features:
- 25 free templates, 60+ premium templates
- 5 plus font types and advanced text options
- Supports both photo and video formats
What’s also handy is you can easily add stock imagery by clicking the Unsplash tab where you’ll find huuundreds of dreamy professional shots. This is an app that makes for compelling storytelling and considering consistency is key on Insta, choosing templates within a theme means every post stays beautifully on-brand.
Pay to upgrade and you’ll have access to premium features, including over 70 high-quality templates. There’s no way your followers will be swiping right over those beauties.
Canva
Next up is possibly the fastest option for crafting a wide variety of stories designs. There’s a massive amount of ready-made templates to choose from – over 60,000 to be exact. Phewf. All you need to do is select the layout you like, pick one of the templates and get personalising.
There’s plenty of tools to help you along the way, from blurring to rotating, and little extras like stickers, frames and text animations. You’ll find a heap of stock imagery to use as a background and there’s no less than 130 different fonts.
A major plus of Canva is you can use it on your desktop as well as your mobile to make it even easier to plan your stories in advance. One thing to note: it can take some time to go through the many, many templates to find the style you want, but once you get into your groove, it’s well worth it.
PhotoGrid
This is a simple, easy-to-use app to make picture or video collages for your Instagram Stories. PhotoGrid has several templates, specifically for Instagram Stories, that you can choose from.
It has a lot of filters, stickers, fonts, and photo effects that you can use to create customised images. The app also provides photo editing features like clipping an object from a picture or removing the background. It also has some beautifying features to add or remove makeup in selfies and profile shots. And it has a selfie camera with which you can take selfies and it will automatically beautify the images.
PhotoGrid can also be used to create memes for Instagram Stories. Additionally, it provides the option to add GIFs to those memes.
You can download the app for both Android and iOS devices.
Key Features:
- 300+ photo collage templates
- Makeup and beautifying feature for profile shots
- Real-time selfie camera and video recorder, along with smart face filter
- 60+ filters
- Over 90 different backgrounds
CutStory
This iOS app lets you create a series of 15-second videos for your Instagram Stories by cutting a long video.
One of the key challenges faced while posting video Stories is that an Instagram Story needs to be shorter than 15 seconds. This app solves that problem and creates a continuous stream of 15-second videos that you can directly post as Instagram Stories.
Key Features:
- Cuts long videos into 15-second clips fit for Instagram Stories
- Supports all video formats
StoryArt
This is one of the highest-rated Instagram Story editing apps on both the Play Store (4.7 stars) and Apple Store (4.8 stars). This app is very easy to use, as it provides a huge variety of preset templates that you can directly use to create your Instagram Stories.
Apart from the templates, it also provides myriad options to add design effects. You can add text with varying fonts, filters, themes, and other design effects.
The app can be downloaded for both Android and iOS devices.
Key Features:
- 200 plus free templates
- 20 plus themes
- Weekly template additions
Typorama
If you are looking for an app that lets you quickly add fun and attention-grabbing text over your Instagram Story images, look no further than Typorama.
It lets you create beautiful typographic designs with ease. All you need to do is select a background and start typing your message. The app has a wide variety of typographic layouts with different font and typeface options to choose from.
Apart from the advanced text tools, this app also provides several photo editing features. From filters and overlays to image correction options, it has everything you need to polish your background images.
This app is currently available only for iOS devices.
Key Features:
- Over 50 typographic styles
- 100+ fonts and typefaces
- Advanced text styling tools
- Hundreds of quotes to use for your Stories
- Thousands of stock images to choose from
- Gradients, shadows, and distortion features for text enhancement
Conclusion
Instagram Stories is a fun and engaging feature where users post a series of photos or short-form videos that appear on Instagram for 24 hours. This feature has become extremely popular, and more so, due to the plethora of options available to make them more interesting.
While Instagram itself provides a lot of creative options to create Stories, using more specialised apps can further enhance your Stories.