How to Post to Instagram from Your PC

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Finally, it’s possible to get your high-quality photos uploaded to Instagram (IG) without exporting them first to your smartphone. Upload straight from your PC. However, you can only upload one picture at a time and no bulk export is possible.

What happened? Instagram wants you to strictly share photos from your mobile phone only. As Instagram got more popular companies and advertiser quickly discovered the power of Instagram and started uploading pictures taken with DSLR cameras and photoshopped images to Instagram. They export the photos to their smartphone and from there you can now post it freely to your own Instagram-Feed.

This takes multiple steps and is not very user-friendly. As Instagram rolled out their app for Windows it was possible for people with touch screens to upload photos directly from the PC. This loophole was closed quickly by Instagram itself.

Currently, IG is working on improving their mobile website and allowing users using the Instagram account with the mobile website instead of the app. This is handy for areas where the network quality is not as good as for example in the USA. This new improvement also lets the users share their photos via the mobile website instead of the app.

This is the basic we need to post from a regular desktop PC to our IG-Feed. It’s fairly simple and should work pretty much with almost all browsers allowing the change of the “user agent”. The user agent tells a website if you are browsing the site from a mobile device, desktop, tablet and even what kind of operating system you use.

 

I tried this myself with the Google Chrome browser but it should work with other browsers like Opera, Firefox and so on….

Opening the Instagram Website with your normal browser on PC will show you a bar at the top of the website like this.

Instagram.com on Desktop

All we need to do now is to change the user agent to a mobile device. I set mine to Android KitKat and it worked just fine. If you reload the site now you will see something like this. Notice the camera icon in the center of the bar.

Mobile version of the Instagram website

Here is what you need to do:

Download one of these extensions for your browser:

User-Agent Switcher for Chrome
User-Agent Switcher for Chrome
Developer: Unknown
Price: Free

User-Agent Switcher
User-Agent Switcher
Developer: esolutionsnordicab
Price: Free

User-Agent Switcher
User-Agent Switcher
Developer: Linder
Price: Free

Check the extension you installed on how to use it. The three extensions above give you an icon in the browser which you can click and after that select any mobile device.

Now go to www.instagram.com, log in if you aren’t already, and you should see now a camera symbol in the top center of the website. If so, you did everything right and are now able to upload photos straight from your Desktop PC or Laptop to Instagram.

Your Instagram website should look now like this. It should give you a button at the bottom of the screen with the label “Open in app”.

When you click on the camera symbol at the top center of the screen, the explorer window should open and you should be able to browse your PC and select the desired photo to post.

Issues

The only issue I have with the mobile site is resizing the image. Because my laptop has no touchscreen, I haven’t found a way yet to resize the image. I am only able to upload the recommended crop of the image or the full image itself. If you are on a PC with a touch screen you shouldn’t have any issues here.

There is also no guarantee how long this little workaround will work before Instagram finds a way to close this hole. Until then have fun uploading your pictures from your PC now.

Instagram, Photo Tips, Tutorials & Techniques, Photography
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