Instagram today took the wraps off of a couple major changes to its mobile apps that are aimed at helping you to find photos posted by others.
First up is a refreshed Explore page that will show trending tags and places in real-time, with the goal of helping you to experience current events through the eyes of others. Instagram will also offer curated collections at the top of its new Explore page that’ll highlight accounts and places that the Instagram team thinks are interesting.
The new Explore feature will be available exclusively to the US at launch, but Instagram plans to roll it out to the rest of the globe after fine-tuning the feature for other countries.
The second big update coming to Instagram is an improved search feature. You’ll be able to search for tags and people, just like normal, but you’ll also be able to search places so that you can find all of the photos from a particular location. There’s also a new Top Search feature that’ll let you look across people, tags, and places at once.
These new Instagram features sound like good ways to help users stretch out of the feed of their friends’ photos and see what else is happening around the world. Both the new Explore and Search features will be available in version 7.0 of the Android and iOS Instagram apps, which are launching today.
