Now you don’t have to be sitting side-by-side to take a hilarious face-swap selfie with your friends, babies, or celebrities you’ve never met. Snapchat’s latest iOS update lets you face-swap with photos in your Camera Roll.
This adds a new layer of hilarity to Snapchat’s already ridiculous feature, which lets you trade faces for selfie snapshots and videos. The new face-swap filter works similarly to the original. Open Snapchat, turn the selfie camera on, then do a long press on your face to bring up the variety of filters that Snapchat offers every day. The new option is next to the original face-swap filter, but the icon is purple instead of yellow.
Need an ego boost? Just swap out your mug for Angelina Jolie’s gorgeous face.
Snapchat will automatically bring up a gallery of faces from your recent Camera Roll snaps that you can swipe through. My obvious choices included my friends, partner, and new baby nephew, all of which looked incredibly creepy. So I decided to see what I would look like as some of my favorite celebrities, which is easy to do by saving images online to your Camera Roll. Not surprisingly, Angelina Jolie’s face is ultra flattering if you need an ego boost.
Snapchat typically doesn’t allow you to use images from your Camera Roll, limiting you to shooting photos and videos in-app. But people love the face-swap feature, and even Facebook is getting in on the action with its recent acquisition of a dedicated face-swapping video app, Masquerade. Snapchat knows that variety is key to keep people coming back for more, and though it’s had some missteps lately (see: the controversial Bob Marley filter for 4/20), its constantly changing options are usually a hit with users.
The iOS update also eliminates the option to buy replays of snaps, indicating that Snapchat will focus its money-making efforts on advertising instead of in-app purchases.