How To Get More Filters on Snapchat
Enable Filters
The first thing we need to do is enable filters on Snapchat if they aren’t already. We’ll be using the Android version of Snapchat, but both the iOS and Android versions are largely the same. Enabling filters (or ensuring they’re enabled) is a simple task as long as you know where to look. Open up your settings menu inside Snapchat by sliding down from the camera interface (on newer versions of Snapchat, you may have to tap on the Bitmoji icon in the top-left corner instead of swiping down). The settings link is in the top-right corner of your display. Tap it.
Using Filters
With Snapchat filters enabled, it’s time to learn exactly how to use filters effectively in Snapchat. The app does a relatively terrible job of teaching you how to use filters, so let’s take a look at some tips. With Snapchat, some filters are permanent, while others—specifically geofilters based on your location and AR filters—will cycle and change based on what Snapchat’s offering at a specific time. You can cycle through filters by swiping left and right once you’ve taken an image for a video. Let’s take a look at each of these:- Color filters: The most basic type of filter, these are always enabled inside Snapchat. You’ll find four different filters for changing the visual appearance of your photo. The first smooths out your skin tone, artificially removing blemishes and acne while also brightening your photo. The second is a sepia-styled filter, placing a sun-baked look on your photo. The third boosts the blue levels of your image while also oversaturating specific colors to create a unique look. The fourth is a simple black and white filter.
- Overlay filters: These place some contextual information on your snap based on where you are and what you’re doing. First, we have the speed filter, which will detect how fast you’re moving. If you’re a passenger in a car, or on an airplane or bus, your phone will detect your average speed at the time of taking a photo. Next, the temperature, which is based on your current location. After that, the time filter, displaying the time you took the picture (this will stay the same while you design your snap, so if you want to make a specific reference to a time, you don’t have to rush as long as your picture was taken at that time). An altitude filter will appear occasionally, depending on your altitude at a current moment. Finally, if your phone is over 95 percent battery or under 10 percent battery, a filter displaying a happy or sad battery icon will be accessible for use.
- Geofilters: These are entirely based on your current location, and work for towns and cities large and small. Not every town has a local geofilter, and certain towns may default to the city they’re near. Other cities, like New York’s individual boroughs or Los Angeles, have multiple geofilters for tracking your location depending on the part of the city you find yourself in.
- Day of the Week filters: These are really similar to the overlay filters, but they’re all uniquely designed and, depending on your location, will change to say your town or city’s name below. Unlike the plain white design of the clock or temperature, these are cartoonish and fun in design.
- Sponsored filters: You might also see some sponsored filters for everything from movies to stores like Walmart to any other products made to be sold to mass audiences. Advertising is how Snapchat makes the majority of their cash, and you can bet those filters show up in your feed on a regular basis. If you’re curious if a filter is sponsored—beyond the fact that it’s typically pretty obvious—just look for the word “Sponsored” somewhere in the snap. This won’t be on your snap when you send it, and fades away after a few seconds, but Snapchat does make it clear and obvious what is and isn’t a sponsored filter.
- Bitmoji filters: Though Bitmoji originally began life as an independent company called Bitstrips (you may remember the customizable comics; they were incredibly popular on Facebook), Snapchat finally acquired the company in 2016, following a year of integration within the app itself. If you haven’t already made a Bitmoji on your Android or iOS device, you won’t see these options appear until your accounts are linked; that said, once you’ve created your digital avatar, there’s a ton of fun to be had with Bitmoji inside of Snapchat. And while most Bitmoji usage comes from stickers within the app, there are, on occasion, Bitmoji filters that feature your own avatar placed into the filter. Likewise, when you’re replying to a friend, you can also gain access to a Bitmoji filter, that has the two Bitmojis featured together.
Additional Filter Options
Alright, so we’ve covered the basic filters and what they do, but Snapchat offers so much more for filters and effects that what we’ve covered above. Snapchat doesn’t do a great job in teaching users exactly how these filters and augmented reality effects work, so it’s no surprise that some users have the hardest time getting these tips and tricks to work. A lot of this stuff spreads purely on word of mouth, and if you’re unfamiliar with Snapchat’s inner workings or you haven’t had a friend explain this stuff to you, it can be confusing at best and impossible to learn at worst.So, we’re going to break this down into three categories: expanded filter usage, AR filters, and custom geofilter options. All three of these give you brand new creative options for expanding your Snapchat world. So get creative, and let’s begin.
Expanded Filter Usage
So we covered every standard filter you can use on Snapchat, but this creates a problem: what if you want more than one filter placed on your snap? Color filters and geofilters, for example, don’t interfere with each other, but swiping through filters changes the appearance one at a time. Is it possible to use more than one filter?Yes but you can only use two at a time. Snapchat doesn’t make this incredibly clear, but filters can be swiped through while maintaining a filter by swiping through filters while holding a finger down on your screen. So, use one finger to select one filter, then press and hold your thumb on the screen while using your finger to swipe through additional unused filters without changing the first filter. Want a black and white filter that also shows the time? No problem. A smoothing skin filter that shows the day of the week? Absolutely.
And don’t bother trying to add a third filter using three fingers. With the exception of AR filters, Snapchat’s a two-filter-at-a-time game.
There is one other filter trick Snapchat hides from users though, and it’s arguably even cooler than the ability to use two filters at a time. Those standard overlay filters we talked about above—time, temperature, and speed? Each of them have brand new filters if you tap them, providing new or additional information, or changing the format of the filter itself.
- Time: The time filter can also become the date in two separate styles (07/01/2017 or July 1, 2017, for example), making it useful if you’re trying to save a snap with the specific date of your event rather than the time.
- Weather: This one has a bunch of options. Tap it once to get an hourly forecast for your area, and again to get a three-day forecast. Tapping it a third time will change the unit of measurement for the temperature from fahrenheit to celsius or celsius to fahrenheit, depending on your location and the standard setting for your country (as a general rule, fahrenheit for the US, celsius nearly everywhere else). Once you’ve switched to the other measurement, you can then use the hourly and three-day forecasts in the alternate unit of measurement.
- Speed: Like with weather, tapping speed will change your unit of measurement from miles/hour to kilometers/hour, or vice versa, depending on your location in the world. Tapping the speed filter again will change it back.
AR Filters
Lately—over the past year or two, in fact—Snapchat’s main focus has been on augmented reality, or AR filters (called “lenses” by Snapchat). The phrase “augmented reality” has become a bit of a buzzword over the past year or so, starting with Snapchat’s usage of AR inside their filters and exploding with the release and popularity of Pokemon Go last summer, which used AR to show Pokemon on your camera in the “real world” (though most serious players turned this feature off nearly immediately). Augmented reality has also become something of a competitor to virtual reality machines like the Oculus or Vive from HTC and Valve. Augmented reality refers to using a camera, along with location and sensor information, to place a digital object on your screen that “appears” to be in the real world, without actually being there. Unlike virtual reality, goggles or a headset aren’t needed to accomplish augmented reality—you just need a phone with a good camera and the proper sensor support. And while companies like Samsung and Google are investing in mobile virtual reality headsets, Apple is preparing to go all-in with augmented reality, announcing AR Kit at their developer conference in June 2017 for developers to take advantage of up and coming technologies in this segment of the market.
If you’re new to Snapchat, AR filters may seem out of your league or impossible to learn how to use, but this simply isn’t the case. Augmented reality is actually incredibly easy to learn how to use, and just as we saw with standard filters above, there are a ton of options here for us to fool around with. First, the basics. Activating an AR filter is just as easy as using standard filters, but with two big differences: AR filters are applied before you take the shot, not after, and instead of sliding through options, you tap on the camera display to activate AR mode. Once you’ve done this, you’ll see plenty of different options to pick from. To preview and use these AR filters, simply slide your finger between the options along the bottom of your screen, with each filter represented by a circle icon. Most filters are made to be used with the front-facing camera, but there are some alternate versions. Let’s take a look at some examples of filters. Since Snapchat adds and removes new filters everyday, we’ll just be listing some sample filters instead of focusing entirely on what each filter looks like.
- Sponsored filters: These don’t always appear, but when they do, they’ll typically be among the first filters you’ll see within the app upon activating AR mode. Despite their sponsorships, these can sometimes be a bit fun to play around with—for example, the film 47 Meters Down, a shark attack movie, used a sponsored filter showing the area around you being attacked by swimming sharks.
- Animal filters: Hot off the success of the dog filter, Snapchat’s added (and regularly adds) new animals for you to play around with. Typically these include a nose change, some form of animal ears, and even virtual glasses. These can be really cute, though your mileage may vary depending on the variation chosen on the app at a specific time.
- Face modifiers: Obviously, most of these AR filters modify how your face looks, but some of them can really do a number. The classic example of this is the big-mouth filter, which magnifies your mouth so it takes over half of your face, but there’s plenty of other options that rotate in and out while you’re using the app.
- Friend filters: These can vary from animal filters to face-modifiers, but Snapchat almost always has a filter than can support two people in the shot at once. They can sometimes be used solo as well, but they’re definitely more fun with a buddy, so grab a friend and try them out.
- Action filters: These require you to perform some form of movement to activate an action within the filter. Typically, the reaction involves opening your mouth, raising your eyebrows, or blinking. This can trigger everything from the dog tongue licking the screen on the dog filter to magic cards flying everywhere as you’re wrapped in a Harry Potter-inspired scarf. These are a ton of fun, though you’ll want to record the filter instead of taking a simple photo snap for sending to others.
- World filters: These are the newest additions to Snapchat, and they’re built a bit different than you’re probably used to for AR filters. Instead of using your front-facing camera, these use the world around you to put cartoon characters and other words and creative phrases into a background, similar to how Pokemon function in Pokemon Go. You can move and resize these characters, making it easy to modify and change how your snap looks right from inside the app.
- 3D Bitmoji lenses: Like the standard Bitmoji filters listed above, you’ll have to first create and sync a Bitmoji avatar with your Snapchat account to gain access to these lenses. Basically, your app will create a 3D version of your standard Bitmoji, creating a virtual “you” that you can place anywhere in the world around you. There are typically two or three different animations available at a time, and you can find them in the same menu for AR filters as the rest of your content. The circle icons are typically highlighted in blue or green to designate that they’re a 3D Bitmoji filter, and the work relatively the same as the World filters we mentioned above.
Finally, the standard guidelines for these lenses: most Android phones running Android 4.3 or above should support them. For iOS devices, lenses are supported on the iPhone 4S and above, iPod 5th generation, iPad 2nd generation and above, and Original iPad Mini devices and above.
Custom Geofilters
Our last suggestion for new filters on Snapchat is probably a bit out-there for most users, but we think a select few will really love them. Above we mentioned Snapchat’s reliance on advertisers placing ads within Snapchat, saying it’s the majority of how Snapchat makes their money, and this is absolutely true. That said, there is another path of money making for Snapchat, and it’s through custom geofilters. These on-demand filters allow you to create your own filter for a limited area for events, weddings, businesses, announcements and more. It’s a really interesting idea, and as long as you’re sensible about where you’re keeping the filter in effect, it’s pretty affordable too.There are two separate ways to do this, and it really depends on how much energy and time you want to put into designing and creating a filter. If you know a lot about graphic design, or you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of designing a filter, you’re better off with our second option. For most users, follow our first direction to quickly and easily create a custom filter for your friends and family to use at an event, or to hype your business.
summer vibes”). Choose your category to load a list of standard templates to pick from for geofilters. Tapping on an option will give you a sample photo of your filter, and you can do one of three things from here: go back to the options menu, select the geofilter, or customize it with your own text and drawings.
- Personal geofilters don’t use any sort of branding or promotion. Business geofilters do, and both have separate guidelines for rules that you can find in more detail here.
- You can’t use hashtags, photographs of people, phone numbers, email addresses, and other similar information. The link above has a full list of do’s and don’ts.
- If you’re looking to design your own custom filter in Photoshop or Illustrator, you’ll want to know these design guidelines: files should be 1080×1920, under 300kb in size, and should be careful not to take up too much room on the screen, otherwise you’ll risk being turned down for your design.
