A story kept on your profile appears in a grid, and each entry shows one frame. That frame can be chosen — any moment from the video, or a picture of your own.
It is the only part of a kept story most people ever see, because the grid is where the decision to tap is made.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Choose the frame a kept story shows.
- check_circle Pick one that reads at thumbnail size.
- check_circle Make a grid that looks deliberate.
- check_circle Change a cover later.
A slider runs through the video so any frame can become the cover.
grid_view The frame that does all the work
Left alone, the cover is whatever the video happened to start on — usually a blurred half-second while the camera settled, or a shot of the ground. That frame then represents the story permanently on a page people open to decide something about you.
Choosing one takes seconds and changes the grid entirely. The right frame is the recognisable moment: the finished thing, the face, the place, whatever somebody would point at if asked what the story was about.
Size is the constraint everybody forgets. These are thumbnails, so anything relying on detail or on text disappears. One clear subject filling the frame is the only thing that survives, and a wide shot of a room becomes grey texture.
Taken together the covers are a set rather than a series of individual choices. A grid where every cover is a close, bright subject reads as deliberate; one mixing bleached outdoor shots with dark interiors reads as an accident, whatever the stories themselves are like.
Four decisions
The third is what turns a list into a page.
movie The recognisable moment
zoom_in What survives being small
dashboard The grid as one thing
build Ten minutes on an old profile
The cover is the whole story, for most viewers. One clear subject, and the same treatment across the grid.
settings Setting one
- Open a kept story on your profile And find the cover option.
- Scrub to the recognisable moment Not the first frame.
- Or use a separate picture For anything important.
- Check it at grid size On your own profile, not in the picker.
- Match the treatment across covers Brightness and framing.
- Remove the ones that do not belong Six good entries beat twelve.
This page chooses the frames on your profile grid. The curriculum step is the rest of that page: the avatar and its history, what moves and what does not, and what a profile communicates before anybody reads a word of it.
At a glance
- 1Story covers
Choose the frame shown for kept stories.
- 2Thumbnail size
One bright, clear subject reads best.
- 3Change later
Covers can be updated anytime.
Updated
