Snapchat Gives Users Way To Browse, Use Community-Made Camera Filters

Snapchat’s augmented reality (AR) selfie filters are one of the app’s most popular features. With nothing more than a few swipes, users can turn themselves into deer or dogs, or make their skin far more radiant than it is usually. According to Snap’s company blog, users can now search for community-made filters within the app.

Until now, the filters (officially called Lenses) could only be found in a Lens Carousel screen that Snapchat frequently refreshed, changing out which filters were available and giving users limited options. Snap’s Tuesday blog post said a new icon on the Carousel screen will take users to a new Lens Explorer tab, which will let them search for lenses made by independent developers.

Snapchat’s official Twitter account retweeted this example of a community-made lens on Tuesday. Lenses can apply to either the selfie camera or a phone’s regular camera.

The unofficial lenses are made by developers in the Lens Studio design app. Snap released the app at the end of last year and, according to the Lens Explorer blog post, developers have made more than 100,000 filters for Snapchat.

The new exploration page will be a boon for a feature that more than 70 million people actively use every day, per TechCrunch. One of the few things Snapchat has over its competitors is that it is more or less the place to go for AR features. Facebook revealed Tuesday that AR-centric ads would start appearing on users’ news feeds in an attempt to catch up to Snap’s success in the field.

Still, Snapchat has fallen deeply behind Instagram as the picture and video-capturing app of choice. Instagram’s Stories feature alone has more than double the amount of daily active users as Snapchat’s entire app, for instance. Doubling down on the popularity of its AR features could help Snapchat capitalize on what it already does well.

Snap even announced a series of AR-themed games in April.