“Over the past six months, you’ve seen many exciting changes come to Instagram, from a new icon to longer videos and even a new way to share everyday moments with Instagram Stories. And as things change, we’re still focused on improving the core parts of Instagram,” the announcement read. 

The function is available for Instagram on iOS and will be available on Android in the coming weeks.

Less than 16 hours after the announcement was made on Instagram, 1.8-million people viewed the post and more than 11 500 comments were posted. 

media update tested the new capability on an iPhone 5s. We placed two (or more, if you want) fingers on an image in our feed and dragged them across the screen for a more in-depth view of the graphic. 

Unlike the pinching-zoom capabilities of Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp, Instagram's zoom works only as long as your fingers are on the screen.