Instagram, with its broad reach and popularity, has quickly grown to become one of the world’s largest social media platforms. It is regarded as the best photo & video sharing platform globally owing to its simplicity, usage, filtering tools, and more.
It has not only become a platform for influencers to post content to their Instagram accounts, many people use Instagram to communicate, share photographs and short videos, and stay in touch with friends, coworkers & loved ones.
One of the interesting features of Instagram is direct messaging. It lets you chat with your friends and send photos & videos to them.
Sometimes you may want the messages sent in DM to disappear immediately, never to be seen again. You might want to have this option due to privacy reasons or because you don’t want to view redundant messages from earlier chats, which might clutter up the chatbox. Another reason is you want to erase old messages, videos, and photographs so that they won’t consume your phone’s memory.
For this reason, Instagram has come up with a Vanish Mode option. This can help you automatically delete messages when you close the chat.
What is Vanish Mode On Instagram?
Vanish Mode is a new feature on Instagram Direct Message(DM) where your chat messages disappear automatically once the recipient has read them. This feature is also available on Facebook and Snapchat. However, their methods of operation differ. The vanish mode option can be turned on or off.
It is also important to note that the messages won’t be archived, which means they can’t be recovered again. So, unless the recipient took screenshots or took a photo with a camera of the messages exchanged, your secrets are safe with Instagram.
How to Turn ON Vanish Mode On Instagram
Vanish Mode is simple to activate, here’s how.
Before turning ON vanish mode, make sure that you have updated the messaging. If you are unable to do it, here are the two simple steps.
- Open Instagram App and visit your profile by tapping your profile icon in the bottom right corner.
- Tap the three horizontal lines at the top and select Update Messaging at the bottom from the listed options. Then, click the Update button.
If the Update Messaging option is unavailable, it means you already have the latest messaging feature.
Now you are ready to get the vanish mode feature in your DM.
How to Turn ON Vanish Mode:
Step 1: Launch the Instagram app and navigate to the conversation page by pressing the “Chat” icon in the screen’s upper-right corner as shown below.
Step 2: Select the chat you want to conversate in a vanish mode.
Step 3: Inside the DM, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. As soon as you start swiping up, you will see a message that says “Swipe up to turn on vanish mode”. Keep swiping without releasing until it shows “Release to turn on vanish mode” in blue color.
Below is the screenshot of how the screen looks after activating the vanish mode.
Now you can start the conversation as usual. As the recipient sees the messages and closes the chat, all the messages will disappear.
How to Turn OFF Vanish Mode On Instagram
This is much simple than turning it on.
Step 1: Go inside a DM where vanish mode is already enabled.
Step 2: If you want to exit Vanish Mode and get back to normal chat, simply swipe up again. Keep swiping until you see “Release to turn off vanish mode”, then release it.
This will take you to the normal chat. The previous messages in the normal chat will still be there when you turn off vanish mode.
This is how you can turn on and off easily by only swiping up to get from one mode to another.
Things to Know About Vanish Mode
Here are the things you should keep in mind while using Vanish Mode. So you can work out whether going into Vanish mode would help you or hurt you.
- When you turn on Vanish mode, the messages, photos, videos, and other content in a chat disappear when someone sees and leaves the chat.
- You can’t save, copy and share the disappearing messages.
- Both you and the recipient will be able to see the messages sent in Vanish mode until you close the chat. Once the chat is closed, the messages are gone forever.
- Vanish mode is not available for group chats.
- Instagram accounts that you have never followed and connected with before cannot send you messages in Vanish mode.
- In Vanish mode, you will be notified when someone screenshots or screen records your conversation.
- The previous messages in the normal chat will still be there when you turn off vanish mode.
