Instagram recently unveiled Stories on its ever-growing social platform, that allows users to stitch together multiple photos or videos which automatically disappear after 24 hours. Despite the controversial launch, people are actually posting and viewing stories regularly instead of the standard uploads. Unfortunately, the feature hasn’t been made available to Instagram’s website and due to the defined expiry period, we tend to miss a lot of posts. Thankfully, there’s a Chrome extension now that allows you to view and even download Instagram Stories on desktop.
Chrome IG Story, a free extension for Google Chrome is a straightforward approach for embedding stories on Instagram’s official web interface. It, essentially, adds recent Stories on top of your feed just like what you get on the mobile application. Posts which aren’t checked by you are surrounded by a vibrant circle and the rest with a gray one. For viewing a story, tap on the person’s profile picture and for moving between the previous or next photo/video, click the arrows present on both sides of the screen or perform a swipe action through the trackpad. You can even go full-screen by tapping the icon present on top left corner. The tool even provides a native zooming option if you click the playing moment itself. If you need to exit the story, either press Esc or the “down arrow” located on the top left corner below fullscreen. Sadly, you can’t switch to the next Instagram story directly, you’ll need to go back and open another one to view.
Another advantage of installing the extension is the ability to download any Instagram Story on your timeline. You just need to right-click a particular post and voila! There’s a “download story” option. It will fetch the entire story in a zip file for saving. Lengthy uploads do take a couple of seconds, though. That’s about it, Chrome IG Story is definitely a must-have Chrome extension if you’re regular Instagram user and the best part is that it is entirely free of cost, so go ahead and give it a whirl.