Instagram’s Stories feature was largely inspired by Snapchat’s own Stories feature, but it has since gone on to take on a life of its own. For those unfamiliar, Stories is a fun way of sharing short video clips or images that will disappear after 24 hours. This is useful if you have some kind of theme going on in your Instagram profile that you’d rather not disrupt with non-related posts.
When you upload a video longer than 15 seconds to your Stories, if it is short enough, Instagram will actually cut up that video for you. For example, if you have a video that’s 60 seconds in length, uploading it to Stories will automatically cut that video into four 15 second segments.
Unfortunately, there is a limit of 1 minute, meaning that the maximum number of times Instagram will splice the videos for you is into four 15 second segments. If you have videos under 60 seconds, then this should not be a problem, but if you have videos greater than 60 seconds, then you’ll want to proceed to the other methods listed below to see which works best for you.
If the method above doesn’t work for you, then you will need to manually cut your videos into either 15-second segments or 60-second segments and let Instagram do the rest. By default, your smartphone will come with some basic video editing tools that will let you cut and trim the video to your desired length.
- Launch the Gallery app
- Select the video you want to trim and tap the Scissors icon
- Tap Trim
- Drag the slider from the left or right to increase or decrease the duration
- Tap the checkmark icon when you’re done
If you want a quicker and easier way of trimming your videos to upload them to Instagram Stories, then you might need to turn to a third-party app. There are several apps you can choose from, and we’ve listed them below where you can download them for either iOS or Android.
Note: All the apps are free to use but some come with watermarks and ads that you can opt to pay a small fee to remove. You don’t have to, but if you want to remove those limitations then you’ll have to pay for them.
- Launch the CutStory app and tap on Video
- Select the video you want to trim
- Tap the download button to the bottom right corner of the screen and select Instagram Stories
- Wait for the videos to be trimmed and processed and it will automatically save it to your phone’s camera roll.
