Facebook’s habit of ripping off Snapchat has reached a whole new level.

The social networking giant is giving the camera a central place on its smartphone app for the first time, encouraging users to take more pictures and edit them with digital stickers — Snapchat-style.

With an update scheduled to take effect Tuesday, Facebook will allow users to get to the app’s camera with one swipe of their finger and then add visual details like a rainbow or a beard of glitter.

Users will be able to share a picture privately with a friend, rather than with the user’s entire list of friends, and add a picture to a gallery known as a “story,” similar to a feature on the Snapchat app.

Facebook has added a number of Snapchat-like elements in recent months — funny stickers and photo sharing among them. By moving the camera to the front and center of its app, however, Facebook appears to be mimicking Snapchat’s app on a more basic level.

What isn’t yet clear is whether the new features will help Facebook lure back the teens and millennials who have left its app in favor of Snapchat. Among other things, teens prize Snapchat’s emphasis on privacy, a concern that has long been shrugged off by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Meanwhile, Snapchat — whose parent company, Snap Inc., went public this month under 26-year-old co-founder and chief executive Evan Spiegel — has recently emphasized its ambitions to build gadgets and has called itself a camera company rather than a social media firm.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network with some 1.86 billion users, denies it took its camera ideas from Snapchat and says it got them from Facebook users.

“Our goal here is to give people more to do on Facebook and that’s really been the main inspiration,” Connor Hayes, a Facebook product manager, said in a briefing with reporters.

In a glimpse of how the features could tie in with other businesses, one of the first camera effects will be the ability to morph someone in a photograph into a yellow, cartoon “Minion.” The latest Minion movie, “Despicable Me 3,” is due out in a few months from Comcast’s NBC Universal.

Facebook has deals to license content from six film studios, as well as from two artists, said Kristen Spilman, design director at Facebook.

Another visual effect that can be added to pictures allows someone in a picture to “become a laser cat with super powers,” Spilman said.

The effects will vary by location. Spilman said that when Facebook tested the ability to add the phrase “LOL” — the acronym for “laugh out loud” — to a picture, users in Ireland were confused by what it meant.