Managing Instagram from macOS desktop

As a long time Mac user (I drew my first map on a SE/30 back in 1992), I recently discovered how difficult it was to manage the company's presence on Instagram from the macOS desktop. Unlike the other social media accounts we have such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc., all of which can all be managed from the desktop in a standard browser, Instagram could not as it is 'mobile only'. What a pain.

I trawled the Internet without much success. There was a third-party extension for Google Chrome, but this was extremely flaky and also inserted its own hashtag after your post. I found a couple of desktop based apps, but they were mainly read only and not of much use unless you paid for premium ones. There is also an app that installs a local website on your Mac in which you can upload the image, create the post text and that then syncs to Instagram. It works, but still not great.

Then it dawned on me, if Instagram is mobile only, why not run a desktop browser in responsive mode to emulate the phone and hey presto, you have a working solution from macOS desktop.

So how do you do this I hear you say? Having run various tests with Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome and can categorically say, Google's Chrome browser is by far the easiest to use to manage and upload images to your Instagram account.

Firstly, you need to get yourself a copy of Google Chrome for macOS. Once installed, navigate to your Instagram account and login. As you can see from the image below, the standard take an image and upload button is not present.

So, how do you to turn the standard Chrome desktop browser into emulation mode to mimic the mobile browser to fool Instagram and get that all important upload button.

Simple, Chrome has inbuilt developer debugging tool which you need to activate. Right-click anywhere on the page and select "Inspect" from the menu.

The developer tools will then suddenly appear normally in the bottom third of the page. On the menu bar, you are looking for the mobile icon as shown.

Simply click on this and Chrome will turn the page into mobile emulation mode. However, the upload button is still not visible as Instagram still thinks you are using a desktop browser. To get around this, simply refresh the web page and 'Bob's your uncle' as some would say, you have the missing camera image/button to upload your photos.

Now just follow the process just as you would on your mobile.

One item to note, most of the screen grabs you may do on macOS are saved as PNG files. Instagram, does not work with these, you'll need to cover them to JPEG files.

Hope this helps.

PS. To close the developer console, simple click on the 'x' on the right of the console menu and then refresh your page to restore Chrome to your traditional desktop state.