Snapchat’s new creative tools: All you need to know

On May 9th, Snapchat announced that a pretty significant update was on its way, changing the nature of how users send snaps and adding powerful new creative tools to combat Instagram Stories’ latest gamut of features.

The toolkit where these new features reside is also being switched from a horizontal menu along the top to a vertical menu down the right side of the screen freeing up more room for even more new tools down the line.

Limitless Snaps

Until now both still and video snaps sent to your contacts top out at a maximum of ten seconds each. As the name implies, Snapchat is lifting the restriction on stills so that recipients can view them for as long as they like, provided the sender chooses the new infinity option when selecting the amount of time a snap is visible for.

Looping Videos

Videos can potentially pack in a lot more information than your standard still snap and with limited replays at your disposal, sometimes it can be all too frustrating when you miss a pertinent part of the clip and aren’t able to go back and rewatch it a third or fourth time.

After recording a video snap, senders can now choose ‘play once’ or ‘play forever’ when reviewing their newly recorded clip, giving potential recipients the opportunity to rewatch that precious ten seconds of footage as many times as they like.

Magic Eraser

Much like Photoshop’s spot healing brush tool, the new magic eraser (which resides alongside the Scissor tool) lets you remove blemishes or other unwanted elements from your snaps by sampling pixels from around the selected area and matching texture, lighting, transparency and shading.

When it works as intended it should look as though whatever you’re trying to cover up was never there to begin with but it can also be used to make some pretty smart visual illusions too.

Drawing with Emojis

Doodling on snaps with the pen tool has been one of the long-standing plus points of Snapchat but now the company is letting you swap out ink for emojis, you can paint with fire, crying faces and even poop.

If you want to know more about Snapchat as a whole, why not check out our in-depth explainer: What is Snapchat?