Posting photos on social media is fairly easy if you have a mobile device. Most social media platforms are built to work on both smartphones and PC or Mac desktop/laptop, except for one: Instagram. You may ask, “Why upload from a desktop/laptop at all?” Well, for many us, a DSLR is our top choice of camera to use and we download images it captures to our machine.
There are apps you can use that can aid you to upload pictures from your desktop/laptop. Some of these are free, some there is a fee, and others are questionable as to their security. However, there is another way you can upload pictures to Instagram from your desktop/laptop, but it is not immediately obvious. There are four steps I’ll describe that you can do if you have Google Chrome Internet browser on your machine.
1. Open Instagram in Google Chrome on your personal computing machine (desktop/laptop). and press your F12 key, or right click on the Instagram page and choose “Inspect.” This will split your screen so that you will have the Instagram account on the left and the code base inspector on the right. Ignore most of that content in the right pane and look at the top left of that Inspector window, and you will see a little icon that resembles a tablet and a phone. After clicking that tablet/phone icon, you will immediately see the left side of the screen change.
2. At the top of the left pane where your Instagram account is at, you will see that it shows “Responsive” as the selected choice. Click that and the drop-down menu shows several phone or tablet options. Pick the one closest to your device.
3. My screen size shows 100%; however, click that dropdown with the number that has “%” and it will show “Fit to Window” option. Select that. Each time, your screen may shift slightly, but that is normal. If you do not select a smaller option, your screen may not show the bottom of the Instagram app screen and there is no way to scroll from this “Inspect” developer window.
4. At this point, you should see a screen that closely resembles what you see on your Instagram mobile app – with the usual plus (+) sign at the bottom that allows you to take or select a photo from your phone gallery. If you click it here in Chrome, it will open a dialogue box to open a folder on your computer where you can select the photo and upload it. Then you will see the remaining standard Instagram screens – the edit screen where you can move the image and select the part you want to use. After clicking “next,” you will land on the share page which allows you to add “write a caption” (or not) and click share. If you do not see the plus (+) sign at the bottom, as you do on this screen, simply refresh the browser window (F5 on a PC keyboard) or the reload button to the left of the address bar. This usually reveals it for the times when it does not appear instantly.
That’s it! You are done! These four steps are all it takes to upload photos to Instagram from your PC or Mac desktop/laptop using Chrome.
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