Instagram’s newest feature lets you go back to watching Reels you’ve watched

Instagram announced on Friday that it will now allow you to go back and see Reels you’ve previously watched thanks to a new “watch history” feature. Rival TikTok has had a view history feature for a few years now.

With the new feature, you can go back and find videos that you may not have had the chance to save. For example, you might watch an interesting clip and then receive a phone call, accidentally close the app while watching, or get distracted by something else and lose your place in the reel feed.

Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in a statement: “Have you ever tried to go back to a clip you watched on Instagram and couldn’t find it?” “Well, there’s a new feature that should help. If you go to Profile and under Settings, under Your Activity, you’ll find your viewing history now, so you can see every clip you’ve ever watched.”

Just like on TikTok, you can sort your viewing history by date, last week, last month, or a specific date range. Additionally, you can remove Reels from your viewing history if you wish.

Instagram’s watch history offers a little more flexibility compared to TikTok, as you can sort videos in chronological order, reverse chronological order, or by author.

Instagram says the feature has been in high demand 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 recover their viewing history. This feature makes the process of finding lost videos simpler and eliminates the need for these types of solutions. Additionally, it offers an Instagram Reels viewing experience on par with TikTok.

Since launching as a clone of TikTok, Meta has created Instagram Reels with features already available in the popular short app. Recently, Instagram began allowing creators to chain multiple reels into a series and launched support for picture-in-picture viewing, both of which are already available on TikTok.