It can happen to anyone of us – especially if there is some liquid encouragement involved that a picture of a highly unflattering nature ends up on a Snapchat story instead of in a friend’s inbox.
The stories are visible to Snapchat friends and sometimes even to the public depending on your profile settings. There are people out there (often our closest friends or wicked younger siblings) who would do anything to eternalize an embarrassing moment, and if something is on a Snapchat story, they can! Although snaps and stories are deleted within a certain time frame – for stories it’s 24 hours – people who can see it can screen capture it.
So, if you have posted a poorly considered snap to your story its best to delete it as soon as possible. It might be worth to view who’s seen it first so you can know who to blame if it ever resurfaces.
Unfortunately, Snapchat does not currently offer an option for deleting an entire story, so if you have a night’s worth of images to delete you may want to equip yourself with a cup of coco and get ready to repeat the steps described below for each of the snaps needing to be deleted.
One benefit of posting to your story vs to a friend though is that if no one has seen it, it’ll be deleted forever without anyone ever seeing it. If you send a snap to a friend, you can’t unsend it. You can however delete messages in the chat before they’ve read them so hit the delete button fast if you’ve sent something you regret.
Back to clearing stories of embarrassing moments though, to delete a snap from your story follow these easy steps:
- Open your app and click on your profile avatar in the top left corner
- Once your profile is open tap My Story
- Your story will open, and you can navigate through the snaps on it, find a snap you want to delete
- Swipe up on the screen
- Hit the trashcan icon and confirm you want to delete the snap in the popup window that appears
Repeat for each snap you want to delete from your story. Remember that they will all be deleted from prying eyes at the end of 24 hours, so if it’s just a little cringe rather than totally terrible and embarrassing it mightn’t be worth the effort.
