How To Upload Photos To Instagram From Your Mac

It seems that uploading to Instagram is something you can only really do from your phone. But by tricking the site into thinking your Mac is a phone, you can easily upload photos and viddos to Instagram in Safari on your Mac.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to post a photo to Instagram using your Mac.
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So posting to Instagram on your phone is easy. Just go to the Instagram app. You can take a picture or select one from your library and post it. You can also do it from the Photos app on your iPhone. You can share to Instagram. But on your Mac it's a little more difficult. There used to be third party app that allowed you to upload directly to Instagram. But they don't work anymore because Instagram doesn't support those. You could also use some expensive scheduling tools that social media experts use. 
Well, you would think you could do it directly to Instagram. Right. Here I am at my Instagram account. There should be a way for me to upload a photo. It would be an easy button to find here. But it's not here. I just doesn't exist. There's no way to do it. I can view my account. I can view other people's photos. But I can't upload a new one from my Mac. It's especially annoying if you're editing images, adding text to them, doing various things on your Mac but in order to get them to Instagram you have to save them out to your Photo library, then go to your iPhone, and then upload them from there.
But there is a way to do it here on your Mac using Safari. You have to trick Instagram into thinking your Mac's an iPhone. The way to do this is to go to Safari and then Preferences. Then go to Advanced. Then click Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar. So this is a special menu of developer commands. If you're not a developer you really don't need this. But there is one thing here that will help us. If you go to User Agent. The User Agent is a little piece of text that your browser extends to the server to tell it what type of browser it is. In this case it's the default which is Safari for Mac 13.1.
But I can change that and say, no tell the server that I am actually an iPhone. If you change that to iPhone then this will reload and Instagram's website thinks you're an iPhone. So it gives you the iPhone version of the website. Notice what you get. At the bottom you get the Plus button there. Click that to then select an image and upload that to Instagram. I'll do that for this image here. You can see it doesn't look super pretty here. It fills the screen. It kind of looks a little better if I shrink the browser window to be kind of the format of an iPhone. So something like that. Now it looks a little bit more like we're used to.
Now you can go to Filter here and add a filter to it if you wanted to. You can go to Edit here. You can click Next and then you can write a caption. You could add a location if you want. You can tag people and then you can hit Share and it will share it out. When you're done you can just go to Develop, go to User Agent, and switch back to Default. It will reload the page. I can stretch it back here and I can see Instagram as you would normally see it in your browser on your mac.
Also I should add if you want to upload it from your Photo Library you can click that same button there and then on the left side you should see under Media, your Photos. Click that and it should give you access to your Photo Library. So you can look at Albums, and different parts of your Photo Library and double click to select a photo from there. Then upload it without having to create a file first.
So that's really all there is to it. It's pretty quick and straight forward. It's just a couple quick extra steps that takes a few more seconds and it's much more convenient sometimes to upload a photo from your Mac than it is to transfer it to your iPhone first.

Comments: 11 Responses to “How To Upload Photos To Instagram From Your Mac”

Ron Melzer

5 years ago

This was a fantastic topic. I often wondered if there was a way to get around the Instagram posting issue from a Mac and now I have a workaround.

Douglas Brace

I wonder if Facebook/Instagram will make a version of the app using Catalyst so that macOS and iOS can both use Instagram from an app instead of a web browser.

Dean Kutzler

So cool! Thanks for this tip, Gary!

Beatrice Stevens

I would like to know how to Download photos from Instagram.

Gary Rosenzweig

Beatrice: Safari, Preferences, Advanced, Show Develop menu. Then you can use Develop. Show Web Inspector and switch to "Images" on the left of the inspector. Then scroll through the images and drag and drop out to the Finder.

SUDHIR HARI PHADKE

i find that my i mac hasn't got the DEVELOPE in the SAFARI menu. can you advice.thank you.

got it GARRY!

Dennis

Hi Garry,
Thanks for this and so many of your topics. One disadvantage to this method I have found is that you cannot link the uploads to your FB account, which you can easily do when posting from the iPhone. Or do you know a way?

Dennis: Not sure. Is that something the Instagram app does? If so, I guess you need to be using the app to do that.

Darlene Atwell

Hi Gary, any idea why my User Agent is greyed out so I can't change it to the iPhone setting?

Darlene: Not sure why that would be. Have you tried quitting Safari and relaunching it?

Comments Closed.

How To Upload Photos To Instagram From Your Mac

Comments: 11 Responses to “How To Upload Photos To Instagram From Your Mac”

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