Instagram Stories is one of the most popular ways to share videos, reels, and photos with your followers and the Instagram community at large. But sometimes there are good reasons to hide your stories from everyone on Instagram. Here are a few ways you can ensure that your Instagram stories are seen by no one except yourself.
How to hide your Instagram stories from everyone (2 Ways)
Be it to spruce up your Insta highlights or to test new features, Stories sometimes need to remain fully private. Although there is no single option on Instagram that lets you do so, there are ways around it. Here are a few of them:
Method 1: Share your story with an empty list of ‘Close Friends’
The fastest and most efficient method of hiding your Instagram stories is to use the Close Friends list. Here’s how:
SHORT GUIDE
Go to your Instagram profile > More options > Close friends > and select Clear All. Now create your story and tap on Close friends to share it with the empty ‘Close friends’ list.
GIF GUIDE
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
- Open Instagram, tap on your Profile icon, and select More options (three horizontal lines at the top right corner).
- Select Close friends and tap on Clear All to remove all users from the list.
- Tap on Done.
- Then create your story as usual, and tap on Close friends.
Your story will be shared with no one (or will be hidden from everyone, depending on how you see it).
Method 2: Add all your followers to ‘Hide Story From’ option under ‘Story Settings’
Note: Those who have a lot of followers may find it cumbersome to select all users manually, in which case, use the previous method for convenience’s sake.
Though not the ideal way, this method lets you hide your stories from your followers. If you don’t have too long a list of followers, this will work quite nicely. Here’s how:
SHORT GUIDE
On Instagram, go to your Profile > More options > Settings and privacy > Hide story and live and select all your followers. Then post your story as usual.
GIF GUIDE
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
- Open Instagram, tap on the Profile icon, and select More options (three horizontal lines at the top right corner).
- Select Settings and privacy, and select Hide story and live under ‘Who can see your content’.
- Tap on Hide story and live from, and then select all users.
- Sometimes, the list of followers won’t populate fully which may cause you to miss a few users. To get around this issue, you can use the ‘Search’ bar at the top, type ‘A’ and select more users, then type ‘B’ and do the same, etc., until you’ve selected all users.
- Alternatively, if the app still doesn’t work well, you can use the Instagram Lite app for this very process (go to Settings > Privacy > Story > Hide Story From, scroll through the list, and select any users you might have missed on the main Instagram app).
- Check the number of people you’ve hidden the story from by going back a page. If it matches the number of your followers, you’ve successfully added everyone to hide the story from.
- Once you’ve added all your followers to the ‘Hide Story From’ list, you can start adding stories as usual without worrying about anyone seeing them.
Note: Those who have a lot of followers may find it cumbersome to select all users manually, in which case, use the previous method for convenience’s sake.
How to Hide your Instagram stories from non-followers (by changing to a private account)
If you have a public account, you may consider hiding your stories from those who don’t follow you. This can be done simply by switching to a Private account.
SHORT GUIDE
Tap on the profile icon, select More options > Settings and privacy > Account and privacy, and enable Private account.
GIF GUIDE
STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
- Open Instagram, tap on the profile icon, and tap on the three horizontal lines at the top right corner.
- Select Settings and privacy, and tap on Account privacy.
- Toggle on Private account and confirm by tapping on Switch to private.
- Your stories from now on will be hidden from all those who don’t follow you.
How do I hide Instagram stories from everyone except one person
To make your Instagram story visible only to one person, add them (and only them) to your ‘Close friends’ list and choose ‘Close friends’ when sharing your story. Now, you can use the ‘Close friends’ option after creating the story to share with that one person in your Close Friends list.
Will others be able to see if I have hidden my stories from them?
No. Instagram doesn’t let others know if you’ve hidden your stories from them. Though others might be able to deduce that your stories are possibly hidden from them, there is no way to confirm it completely.
Although Instagram doesn’t necessarily make it easy to hide your stories from everyone, it provides all the ingredients for you to get the intended result. We hope this guide helped you with the same. Until next time!
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