How to Post on Instagram from PC or Mac

Instagram is first and foremost designed as a mobile app.

But that doesn’t work for everyone. Maybe you like to edit your photos in something like Lightroom first. Maybe you want to upload photos or videos taken on a camera that’s not your phone. Or maybe you just don’t like typing long captions on your phone and would prefer to use a real keyboard.

Sure, you can email the photos from your computer to your phone, save them on your phone, and then upload them through the official Instagram app. But that’s pretty cumbersome and tedious.

But other options do exist that might work better for some Instagram users, whether you’re using it for social media marketing or sharing photos privately with friends and family.

After years of making it harder than it should be to post on Instagram from a desktop or laptop computer, in late-2021 a new option was enabled on the Instagram.com desktop website to post directly on Instagram from a computer’s web browser.

So you no longer need to use the tricks such as browser plugins or spoofing user agents to circumvent the old restriction. Because of that, I’ve updated this post to reflect the new method.

But if you prefer the old ways to do it, those will also still work, and some of them include features that aren’t currently available on the Instagram.com website. I have guides on some of those alternative methods:

• How to Post on Instagram with a Web Browser by Spoofing the User Agent
• How to Post on Instagram from Mac
• How to Post on Instagram from Mac with Uplet

But here’s an overview of the new functionality for how to post to Instagram from a PC or Mac’s web browser.

How to Post on Instagram from Computer’s Web Browser

Instagram has quietly added a new button to their website. And that new button makes all the difference for what we want to do here: post on Instagram from a desktop or laptop computer rather than a mobile app.

After you log into your account through a web browser, you should see a new + button in the toolbar. (And to be clear, this is just the standard web browser window without resorting to spoofing a mobile user-agent.)

It looks like this:

You’ll then get the magic words:

And, thankfully, they’ve implemented this properly, with the usual feature set.

For example, you can upload multiple photos at once. In this case, I’ve uploaded a series of 10 images for a single post. You can see the left/right arrows on either side, the multi-image icon at bottom right.

You can select the display crop:

You can apply filters:

And make image adjustments:

You can add a caption, tag (click within the image), specify a location, add accessibility ALT information for photos, and turn off comments.

And you’re done!

I like the simplicity of this new method better than the old methods. And I can see myself sharing more photos on Instagram now that there’s less friction going from the photos on my computer to Instagram posts.

What You Can’t Do

There’s no facility to schedule posting. For that, it seems you’ll still need to use one of the social media management services that allow you to schedule posts on Instagram.

If the Post Button Isn’t Showing Up

• This is a new feature. It’s might be rolling out to accounts gradually. Facebook/Instagram don’t publish how they determine the order of rollouts of things like this.
• Try clearing your browser cache then closing and re-opening your browser.

Things Worth Knowing

This method works on PC and Mac desktops and laptops.

I haven’t tested this yet on a wide range of browsers, but it’s working for me on Chrome, Brave, Safari, and Firefox.

FAQs