Instagram's Edits finally available after a lengthy delay

Instagram first announced Edits back in January when CapCut was briefly unavailable as part of the Great TikTok Ban of 2025. But while we still wait to see how that plays out long-term, Edits is now finally available to download.

Given all that has happened with tariffs and the like in recent weeks, the Great TikTok Ban of 2025 seems almost quaint and vaguely dreamlike in comparison. But it was real, it did happen, and in the gaps that the brief disappearance of CapCut from the web opened up, Meta managed to shoehorn in Edits. 

At the time,  Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that it wouldn't debut for a month or so. Indeed, three months is enough time for most people to forget that it was ever announced in the first place given the current speed of the news cycle. But now it's finally here and available to download, what do you get?

To start with, users can capture clips up to 10-minutes long for editing and export them in 4k with no watermark to any platform, which is useful right out of the box and a noted differentiator to the free version of CapCut. And, of course, the video can be easily shared to Instagram with high-quality playback. 

The editing tools are pretty simple but they’re cleanly executed and very much what you would expect. More depth is coming (see below) but it has to be said at the moment Edits is probably a bit light on features. The lack of a desktop version to really take things to the next level is going to be a drawback for some too.

There’s definitely good stuff in there though. Some of the AI tools such as being able to delete video backgrounds work well, while the insights dashboard gives you access to a whole load of Insta stats and lets you see things such as exactly when drop off occurs on your Reels, helping you hone and adapt your content. And being able to browse trending reels and audio is a good way of keeping on top of a continually accelerating zeitgeist.

There's already a roadmap for future developments. The company promises a list that includes: 

• Keyframes: Pinpoint exact moments to animate the position, rotation and scale of your clips.
• Modify: Quickly change the look and feel of your videos with AI.
• Collaboration: Easily share drafts with friends, other creators or brands for feedback and creative builds.
• More options to express your creativity: Even more fonts, text animations, transitions, voice effects, filters, sound effects and music options, including royalty-free.

For now, it's probably fair to say that Edits is more a CapCut lite than a serious competitor to CapCut itself. But, as we know, when Meta gets the bit between its teeth it is capable of iterating very fast and throwing large amounts of money at things. And it has to be said it is currently marginally less likely to disappear off the internet if it annoys the wrong world leader, at least for the next month or so.