Instagram is meant to be used on smartphones, but there are times when photos to be uploaded to the photo-sharing website are all on your MacBook. In a case like this, you typically need to send the photos to your phone through Airdrop and later upload to the platform. It would be easier uploading the photos directly from your Mac to Instagram, but this isn’t allowed.
Although you may be able to log in on Safari or Chrome on your computer, Instagram doesn’t allow photo uploads. Again, there’s no official Instagram client for macOS. For this reason, you may have to settle for third-party Instagram clients for macOS, and most of them don’t come free.
Some of the free Instagram apps available in the App Store for macOS don’t even allow you to post photos to the platform. However, there are two different ways to post to Instagram on your MacBook without buying or installing any app. This tutorial is divided into two parts:
- Uploading photos and videos to Instagram with Google Chrome
- Posting to Instagram with Safari on macOS
Upload to Instagram from Google Chrome on macOS
For those of us who use Google Chrome on macOS instead of Safari for certain reasons, publishing photos to Instagram is quite easy. You don’t even need to install an extension to get this working, you only need to mess with a few browser settings and you’re done.
1. Go to instagram.com and sign in with your credentials.
2. Right-click on a blank space on the page and select Inspect.
3. If the new DevTools panel with raw codes is on the right-side of the screen as shown below, skip this next step.
4. If it’s at the bottom of the page, click the options icon (three little dots). The select the dock to right option.
5. With the DevTools dock now on the right, press CMD + SHIFT + M on the keyboard to change to a mobile device. Or simply use the toggle on the DevTools panel.
6. Select any phone model from the top, but I’m using iPhone X here.
7. Refresh the page and check the bottom, you should now have the + icon to add new photos to Instagram.
You should also get all the features you normally see when you view Instagram from your mobile device. If the DevTools panel on the right bothers you with all the codes showing, there’s little you do about it. You may only resize it. Once you close it, this no longer works.
Upload photos to Instagram on macOS using Safari
You don’t have to jump through many hoops to get this working on Safari.
1. Go to Instagram.com on Safari and log in to your account.
2. From the menu bar, go to Develop > User Agent > Safari – iOS 11.0 – iPhone.
3. With iPhone selected, the page should reload automatically. Check the bottom of the page and you should be able to post to Instagram and even apply filters to your photos.
A camera icon to add a new story too should appear somewhere at the top. For the best experience, you might want to resize your browser to appear really like a phone.