Instagram Adds Watch History for Reels

Oh wow, Meta has implemented another “new” element, this time inspired by TikTok once again.

Late last week, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri announced that Instagram is now getting a “Watch History” feature, which will make it easier to find any video that you’ve watched in the app.

As you can see in this example, in the latest version of IG, you’ll now be able to find a new “Watch History” option, which will display thumbnails of all of the videos that you’ve viewed in the app over the past 30 days.

So if you really want to show somebody that one video, but you can’t remember who posted it, you’ll now be able to go back through your viewing history to find it.

As explained by Mosseri:

“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. You can sort it from oldest to newest, or newest to oldest, you can go to a specific date or date range, and you can even filter it down to a specific person or account that posted that Reel, so hopefully now you can find that thing that you were trying to find that you couldn’t find before.”

Well, not “every Reel that you’ve ever watched,” because as you can see in the screenshot examples, it only covers the last 30 days. But you can now scan through the content that you’ve viewed in the app to find that clip that you remember but can’t quite recall the details of.

Which TikTok already has, and it is actually pretty handy. Because there’s always that thing that you skip past without thinking that comes back to you at a later stage, something you want to show your partner, or maybe a product promotion that was actually, possibly relevant. If you don’t bookmark it, then it’ll be gone forever, and you’ll be endlessly adding in qualifiers to your search text to try and find it, but now, you have another option to minimize such annoyance.

So we already know that this is a helpful feature, and it makes sense for Reels to also have the same, making it easier to get back to that thing you saw that time.

It’s a relatively small, but valuable addition. The update is coming to the latest version of the Instagram app.