Upload photos to Instagram from a PC
Although Instagram is a social network mainly focused on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets , we can also access it from our computer or, in short, any device that has a browser. However, everyone who has tried to upload an image from their computer to Instagram will have seen that the desktop website does not allow it for now.
However, there are ways to use our computer to upload photos to our account , something especially interesting for business users who need to carry social networks from a single site and using a smartphone only for Instagram can be a problem.
In this guide we will see how to use both our browser and external tools that will allow us to achieve our goal of uploading content to the platform from our computer, without having to use a smartphone for anything other than creating our account if we do not have one.
Be that as it may, for this guide we will assume that we have a functional Instagram account, so if we do not have one, we will have to use our smartphone for it, although it is something very simple that we can do quietly .
Developer mode of our browser
Although we are going to use Google Chrome, weird is the browser that does not have a developer mode of some kind , something that in the case of browsers based on Chromium such as Opera, normally we can do exactly the same way as here.
To enter the development console of browsers based on Chromium, we will have to press either F12 (Same as other browsers) or Ctrl + Shift + I , the first being simpler, but the second generally compatible with applications based on Electron as well as Chromium-based browsers.
Once the development mode is open in Chrome, we will see an icon that will allow us to view the web page as if it were a smartphone , something that opens the doors to upload files from our computer.
It should be noted that it is a slightly cumbersome process, because if we update the web with the development console closed, it will go back to desktop mode , so we will be forced to use the development console whenever we want to upload a photo, something quite little optimum.
Extension to change our User-Agent
Something that is used in browsers to determine which version of a web page should be served to us is the User-Agent , a line of text that indicates what operating system we are using, as well as the browser from which we access, so that, If we are accessing a website with a User-Agent from a smartphone, such as an iPhone, the mobile web will be served.
In this case, we use an extension called User-Agent Switcher for Chrome and that we can download in the Chrome extensions store from this link. Once installed, we can manually select which User-Agent we want to use, although for a more permanent solution , we can configure a list of sites that will load with a specific User-Agent.
In our case, the configuration in Custom mode (in JSON) looks like this , although we can always update the User-Agent for the latest one available for the platform we want to pretend we are:
{
"instagram.com": "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/80.0.3987.95 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1",
"www.instagram.com": "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/80.0.3987.95 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"
}
This can be used for more sites, so as we see in the help of the extension, we can add as many filters as we need so that everything works correctly.
Instagram post schedulers from PC
There is another way to upload publications to Instagram from our computer, and it is programming them with external services, such as Later. This service works in a very simple way, and although it has paid features, we can use it for an unlimited time for free, of course, with limited functionality that will be more than enough for the vast majority of us.
Among the most notorious limitations of the free version of Later is the ability to upload 30 photos per month - with a limit of 5MB per file - and to be able to handle only one social set (set of social media accounts), so to Unless we are companies with multiple accounts and advanced growth data analytics needs , the free version of Later will do the trick.
In this case, it is an external service that we can synchronize to our Instagram account and it will allow us programs when we want to upload our photographs, something that on certain occasions will be better for us, especially if we need to maintain a certain regularity or we will simply not be available at a specific time when an image should come to light.
Through Later's payment tools we will be able to have access to new functions and we will unlock some limits, such as the size of the images, the number of them that we can upload at the end of the month, or even have access to an exhaustive analysis of our account that will allow us to know which hashtags are best for our growth, or what hours we have the most audience, in addition to being able to commission other people of our choice to take care of our social networks, although this would already be entering the field for companies.
It should be noted that Instagram does not have a special appreciation for automation tools, because although they are generally legitimate, their behavior can often be mistaken for that of a malicious bot - because for all practical purposes, a publication programmer is still another type of bot - so you have to be careful when using this type of service, doing it with your head, since we can upload photos simultaneously, thus doing it faster than a human could do with one or more smartphones.
Android emulator with Instagram
Finally, and with great less optimal security, we have the option of using an Android emulator , and that is, although the tools exposed so far can be great allies when managing our social networks, sometimes we simply want it to work exactly the same as on our Android smartphone.
In this case, like all our guides in which we need an Android emulator, we make use of BlueStacks, a free Android emulator that can serve us on a large number of computers, although of course it may have certain problems working on low-resource teams.
Either way, installing Bluestacks is very simple. We just have to go to the official website of the software, which is capable of detecting the operating system that is on our computer and downloading the most appropriate version for it. Once the corresponding file has been downloaded from the Bluestacks website, we will proceed to open it and start the installation, at which point the wizard will download the complete emulator and proceed to install it on our disk drive.
For a more detailed explanation of how to install Bluestacks step by step, we can enter the guide to play Android games on PC , where we can see both how to install the emulator and the procedure to download applications in the emulator.
Once Instagram is installed, we can upload photos to the application, but we warn that the procedure is cumbersome. First, we will go to the application and click on the central button, the one that we would use under normal conditions to upload a photo or video, but then we will select the drop-down and click on "Other".
Once this is done, a content selector will open, where we will click on the “ Pick From Windows ” application, something that will open a Windows dialog where we can search for the image that we are interested in uploading to Instagram.
When we have selected the image, a media manager will open in which we can see all the images that we have in the Bluestacks image gallery (remember that it is no longer a virtual machine with its corresponding virtual hard disk ) and click on the image we want to upload.
Once this is done, the image will open and we will have three Instagram icons . These icons would appear without a label, so through trial and error we can see that the left icon allows us to send the selected image by direct message, the central icon allows us to create a publication , and finally the right icon allows us to create a "Stories" with the selected image. Obviously the trash icon will delete the image from the virtual drive.
From here we can proceed as we normally would on a smartphone, although as we have surely noticed by now, the application works much slower than on a smartphone or tablet natively , while the process of importing the images to Bluestacks can be very tedious compared to what we can do with other methods, such as changing the User-Agent of our browser , or simply using a third-party service that allows us to schedule the uploading of images.
Conclution
In general, as we can see, there are several methods to upload photos to Instagram from our computer , but what we do have to be clear about is that they tend to be more laborious than simply uploading an image from our smartphone if we are casual users, while Solutions such as the emulator should only be used if we have no choice , since starting a virtual machine with Android just to upload an image to Instagram is what would be popularly known as killing flies with cannon shots.
In the same way, we can always resort to tools like Later if we really want to have a simplified process when managing our brand on Instagram, something common in the case of businesses where they already have networks - and their corresponding tools - to Twitter, Facebook or other networks.
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