Anyone with the Snapchat app downloaded has probably been silently ignoring the message about deleting Snapchat Memories, hoping it will magically go away. The date is now fast approaching, and you don’t know what to do. $1.99 a month may seem worth it for all the content we have hidden deep in our archives. But we’re also college students on a budget. The question of “Are we too old for Snapchat anyway?” may be lingering in the back of your mind. But then, how will you text your situationship?
I’ve compiled a few budget-friendly solutions so you don’t end up paying $1.99 a month for the rest of your life.
A few solutions:
1. Download
You may have heard the classic solution: just download it to your camera roll. If you’re rolling in phone storage, this is by far the easiest and cheapest solution. But I assume most of us have taken a few too many pictures in front of the Rotunda and are, indeed, out of phone storage.
2. Scrapbook
Scrapbook! Print out your irreplaceable memories and place them in a scrapbook. Not only would this be a nostalgic walk down memory lane, but it would also give you something to talk about with your grandma at Thanksgiving. At around 16 cents per 4×6 photograph, you can print a lot of photos for the price you’d pay for just one year of keeping the app. The only caveat? You cannot print out that video of your best friend sleeping and put it in the book.
3. SLim-down
If you do not have that many memories above 5GB, delete the random selfies of yourself with filters and keep the memories full of lore in the app. If you are not a long-time user or a heavy video taker (and are therefore more likely to have significantly less than 5GB), this might be the best option for you.
4. Burner Account
Make a Snapchat burner account. Having not one but two Snapchat accounts between the ages of 18–22 might be a little much. But if your morals are okay with that, send your memories over to the new account, have them saved to Memories, and then delete the ones you sent. Remember: under 5GB!
5. COllage
Use a collage app to turn a bunch of memories into one photo (great for saving storage). You can get creative with how you want to group these collages. Have one be “New Year’s 2024” or “Times I’ve snapped my crush using a duck face.” This is another great idea for the artistic people, as you can be as creative as you like!
6. Saved in Chats
Have them saved in a chat by a trusted source. There is an important emphasis on “trusted” because we all have embarrassing selfies and videos in our memories that we would prefer not to see on YikYak in the morning. The ones saved in chats are not deleted, so you can just send them and go back through them whenever you desire.
Overall
The final option is to simply accept that not every Snapchat memory needs to survive.
As painful as it may be, do we really need 37 nearly identical pictures from the same night out? Probably not. Sometimes, clearing out your memories can actually be a little freeing. Keep the pictures that mean something to you, save the ones you genuinely cannot live without, and let the blurry, accidental screenshots disappear into the Snapchat graveyard.
At the end of the day, the goal is not to save every single picture you have ever taken. You are not paying $1.99 every month for a picture of your lunch from three years ago that you have never looked at since. You are paying for the “8 years ago today” tomfoolery that you can laugh at and look back on, or send to your hometown friends to start up a conversation when there is little left to talk about. Whether you choose to print your favorite memories, move them somewhere else, make collages, or just do a massive Snapchat clean-out, there are plenty of ways to preserve the moments that actually matter without adding another monthly subscription to your college budget. Your memories may be priceless, but are they worth $1.99?