Hidden Media, Zero Storage Usage, New Drawing Tools, Profile Pictures for Your Contacts, and More

Nobody will miss 2022, but this update offers some pleasant reasons to remember it: media with spoiler effects, new ways to save space on your device, new drawing tools, suggested profile pictures, and more.

Hidden Media

Telegram supports spoiler formatting to hide any text in messages. Now you can also cover photos and videos with a shimmering layer that blurs the image. It will take your recipients one tap to break the spell and see the content.

In the attachment menu, select one or more items, tap or and choose 'Hide with Spoiler'.

Zero Storage Usage

Telegram can take up next to no space on your device. You can remove media and documents from your phone's storage and re-download them from your Telegram cloud at any time. For years, users could set a maximum cache size or auto-remove unused items after a period of time.

With this update, you can add separate auto-remove settings for cached media from Private Chats, Groups, and Channels – with exceptions for specific chats.

The new pie charts help visualize what's taking up space, and dedicated tabs for Media, Files and Music let you clear the largest items in just a few taps.

On iOS, we've greatly reduced the time it takes the app to calculate your cache size. Android users are in luck – their app was already doing this at top speed.

Check out the new options in Settings > Data and Storage > Storage Usage.

New Drawing and Text Tools

Telegram's already powerful media editor has been fully redesigned. Drawing tools dynamically change width based on drawing speed and automatically smooth your lines.

There is a new blur tool to redact sensitive data (or photobombers) – and 5 high-precision ways to choose colors, including the Eyedropper tool.

When adding text to photos or videos, you can now change its size, font, and background. Adding custom animated emoji to text on images is available for all users, even if they don't have a Telegram Premium subscription.

To quickly add shapes like rectangles, circles, arrows, stars, and chat bubbles, tap the “+” button. You can also hold the surface to fill the canvas with color – or to erase everything.

In the coming updates, we plan to further refine the media editor interfaces and improve their performance.

Profile Pictures for Your Contacts

When editing your contacts, you can choose a picture for them – only you will see it on their profile.

If you have a good profile picture for your contact, you can suggest it to them. It will take them just two taps to add it to their profile.

Open a contact's Profile > Edit, then choose 'Set Photo for…' or 'Suggest Photo for…'.

Public Profile Pictures

If you only allow certain users to see your profile photos, you can set a public picture for everyone else.

This update also lets you achieve ultimate profile picture privacy: you can set visibility to 'Nobody' and add some users or groups as exceptions.

These settings are available in Settings > Privacy and Security > Profile Photo.

Hiding Group Members

Tools like the aggressive anti-spam setting help chat admins keep large groups clean – but some groups may also want to protect their members from unwanted personal messages.

Admins of groups with 100+ members can now choose to hide the member list. This way, if people don't send messages to the group, only its admins will know they were there.

New Progress Animations on Android

Smooth new animations have been added when jumping to a faraway reply in a busy chat and to other pages throughout the app.

New Animated Emoji

Premium users get 10 new packs of custom animated emoji as a present from Telegram artists.

Find these packs and more in the emoji tab of your sticker panel.

More Interactive Emoji

We keep expanding our universe of interactive emoji. To watch full-screen effects in sync with your chat partner, send a single in any 1-on-1 chat and then tap on it.