How to post to Instagram from your computer

Instagram is one of the most popular social networking platforms around at the moment. It’s crucial to have an Instagram account if you’re in business, and it can be hard to keep up and keep the relevant content coming in. We’re all too aware of that issue ourselves. One thing that does make it easier is a small trick to be able to upload via your computer, rather than having to use your mobile phone, as Instagram would prefer.

It’s a simple trick that utilises the Developer Tools within your web browser. You don’t need to install any software, as this should work in all browsers that have Developer Tools packaged with them.

For the purposes of this demonstration, I’m using Google Chrome.

I did a quick screencast of how to do it. You can watch that below. If video isn’t your thing, or you prefer to read, then just skip below the video for the typed version.

Video showing how to post to Instagram from your computer

How to post to Instagram without using your mobile

The process is quite simple, so I’ll number out the steps below:

1. Open Google Chrome and go to your Instagram page. In my case, that’s https://www.instagram.com/meeum/
2. Make sure you are logged in to your Instagram account
3. Right click anywhere on the page, and from that context menu, select Inspect, which will probably be the last option

   

4. That opens Dev Tools, which is an incredibly useful set of tools that web developers use to debug websites, and test new functionality. If you’d like to know more about what Dev Tools can do, you should definitely come along to one of our workshops
5. Click the Toggle Device Toolbar button at the top of the Dev Tools menu (it looks a bit like a mobile phone next to a tablet – second option along). That will open a new menu to select what device you want to pretend to be using



6. Select anything you want from that menu to mimic being on a mobile



7. At this point, you must refresh the page which will ‘trick’ Instagram into thinking you are now on a mobile device
8. You’ll now see the bottom menu, just like on the mobile site or in the app



9. That will allow us to hit the ‘add’ button to be able to select a picture from our hard drive to upload to Instagram
10. You can even add a comment of all the hashtags you’d like to use as well

Using your browsers inbuilt Developer Tools to upload a picture to Instagram from your computer is a simple and neat little trick that can save you heaps of time and bother.

I hope that is of help to you!

As always, if you have any questions related to technology (or not), just send them through to ask@meeum.com and we’ll answer them for you.