Instagram announced on Friday that it will now let you go back and see your previously watched Reels thanks to a new “Watch History” feature. Rival TikTok has had a Watch History feature for a few years now.
With the new feature, you can go back and find videos you might not have had the chance to save. For example, you could be watching an interesting Reel and then receive a phone call, or accidentally close the app while watching, or get distracted by something else and lose your place in the Reels feed.
“Have you ever tried to get back to a reel that you’d seen on Instagram and you just can’t find it?,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in an announcement. “Well, there is a new feature that should help. If you go to ‘Profile’ and under ‘Settings,’ under ‘Your ‘Activity,’ there’s Watch History now, so you can see every reel that you’ve ever watched.”
Just like on TikTok, you can sort your Watch History by date, the past week or month, or a specific date range. Plus, you can remove Reels from your watch history if you’d like to.
Instagram’s Watch History offers a bit more flexibility when compared to TikTok’s, as you can sort videos in chronological or reverse chronological order, or by author.
Instagram says the feature was highly requested among users. Before this, users had found workarounds to recover lost videos, such as downloading their data from the app and sifting through it to retrieve their watch history. The feature makes the process of finding lost videos a lot simpler and gets rid of the need for these sorts of workarounds. Plus, it brings the Instagram Reels viewing experience on par with TikTok’s.
Since its launch as a TikTok clone, Meta has been building out Instagram Reels with features that are already available on the popular short-form app. Most recently, Instagram started allowing creators to connect multiple reels in a series and launched support for Picture-in-Picture viewing, both of which are already available on TikTok.
