Post Your Desktop Screenshots to Instagram

Instagram is all about creating, sharing and finding beautiful and interesting images. I use it to follow people who share similar interests (muscle cars, comics, illustration work etc.). With the service, I also enjoy sharing snippets of my art process.

As a service with a mobile app front end, Instagram does many things well. But one area it lacks is the ability to easily post images or screenshots from your computer onto the service. The constraint, it appears, is the mobile device – and Instagram is quite content with keeping that constraint in place.

With the help of a desktop computer, Dropbox and an iOS device, I’ve come up with a workaround to let me do just that.

But why deal with workarounds when it’s easy enough to take a picture of your screen?

Simply put: taking a screenshot of your display using your mobile device can introduce unwanted artifacts in your image. Whether its light bounced back from a reflective display or an annoying moire pattern, taking photos of the screen produces suboptimal results.

My workaround is as follows:

1. From my desktop, place my image (this can be a screenshot or photo) into a dedicated folder inside my Dropbox account. (Let’s call this folder Instagram.)

2. In the iOS version of Dropbox, navigate to the Instagram folder you created in step 1.

3. Next, select the image and click on the “Send to” box, which looks like a square with an arrow protruding up.

4. Choose Open In… from the options.

5. Finally, select “Copy to Instagram”. Your image should then open up within the Instagram app. You can add filters, tag, and publish. That’s it!

Now go make some beautiful and interesting images to share on Instagram!

-Krishna

(I’m pcweenies on Instagram)

Krishna March 23, 2016 Dropbox, instagram, moire pattern, publishing desktop photos to Instagram