Do you manage your company’s Instagram account? Or perhaps you work in a social media agency, and you manage one or more accounts on behalf of clients?
Would you like to post to Instagram from your desktop, the way you probably do all your other social media profiles throughout the work day?
If so, there is a workaround on both Chrome and Safari – and it’s ridiculously simple.
You can’t read/send direct messages, post/see stories or edit photos, but the basic image functionality is there, and you’re on your computer anyway – there are all manner of photo filter sites/tools you could turn to. (You are able to add paragraph breaks easily, though).
We were excited about looking at this as we post quite a few videos for our social media agency clients (and have to otherwise download them to our mobiles through the Google Drive app to then post) but you can’t do that using this tip either. Bah. Any tips to simplify that, throw them our way and we’ll include!
Anyway, on with the guide.
If you use Chrome, here’s how to post to Instagram from your desktop (with how-to images).
(Note, there is an even quicker way than the below, but we thought it’d be beneficial to see the process in images – the quick way is a bit like a 90s video game cheat code):
- Type Ctrl-Shift-I to bring up the Chrome developer window (ignore all of the code on the right)
- Type Ctrl-Shift-M to switch to the mobile version of the site.
- To go back to the desktop site, press Ctrl-Shift-I again to turn off developer mode, which automatically disables device mode, too
Here’s the ever-so-slightly longer way:
If you use Safari, here’s how to do it (according to this great post on Cxncept – we didn’t test on Safari, though)
Go to Safari > Preferences > Advanced. Check the box at the very bottom that says, “Show Develop menu in menu bar.”
Open a private browsing window. Head to Develop > User Agent > Safari — iOS 10 — iPhone. Go to Instagram.com, sign in and click the camera button at the bottom of the screen to upload a photo from your desktop.
A FINAL THOUGHT:
While you’re here, if you’re looking for Instagram hacks, hints and tips, you might quite like (client) Hopper. If you’d like to automatically schedule your Instagram posts in exactly the way we’ve been able to for years with Twitter and Facebook, you should use Hopper. It’s the first tool that does it automatically, unlike other ‘schedulers’ that simply remind you to do it at a specific time.