I don’t usually post advice on tech-related subjects. I made an exception once in this earlier post. Now I’m making an exception again because I got sick of posting on Instagram using my phone and I know I’m not the only one. This is a solution I literally just found, which is why I became excited enough to interrupt the flow of my other posts with a tech piece.

Anyone who follows me or who has gone through my site knows that I’m an artist as well as a writer. All of my digital art is created on my computer, so when I wanted to post it to my Instagram account, I had to send it in an email to myself and then download it on my phone. My phone glitches when I use Instagram, so I would lose all the progress I made in uploading new art. Usually it took two to four tries for me to finally get my work posted, if I managed it at all. Now I’ve found a workaround so that frustration can be avoided.

The first thing I did was put “how to post on Instagram from a PC” into the search engine. Scrolling down the search results a bit, I found a few sites explaining how to post to Instagram from a PC or Mac using Chrome or Safari, but since I mostly use Firefox, those search results were almost useless to me. However, the process itself was, as I found out, transferable to Firefox. I had to play around with it a bit more to reach my objective, but in the end, thank the Great Spirit, it worked out. If you use Firefox on your PC and you’ve found posting on Instagram from your mobile device to be a hassle, read on.

 

Step 1

Open Instagram up in your browser. Log in and go to your profile page.

 

Step 2

Tap those three lines in the corner of your browser window. In the dropdown menu that follows, go to “Web Developer.”

 
Yes, the arrow is sort of pointing upward, but it's close enough to its mark.
 
 
Step 3

In the next menu click “Responsive Design Mode.”

Don't judge my awful arrow.
 
 
Step 4

Now select one of the mobile options to view through.


Click the button around which I drew that horrible oval.

This is the menu you need. The one I selected is check-marked, but so long as the option is mobile, it should do the trick.


Step 5

Now refresh/reload the page (whatever you want to call it) or else it will not display in your selected mode. This should allow you to see that “+” icon you need on your Instagram page; make sure you scroll down enough to find it.

In case you forgot where the reload button is (like I almost did in the heat of the moment), I circled it here . . . or attempted to.

There's that "+" symbol at the bottom. Mission accomplished. Woot woot


You should be able to add your pictures from your PC now without wasting time sending them to your mobile device first. Yay for efficiency!

When you want to exit the mode, just hit the “x” in the corner just under the menu button (the three lines).

And that’s that.

Enjoy your *hopefully* less annoying Instagram posting!

 

Update: After I wrote this, I found a few links to posts on other sites explaining how to post on Instagram from Firefox. Yeah. Awkward. 😑 However, so far, the methods described in those other posts differ slightly from mine. They just reveal another way to access the Responsive Design Mode. Still, it would have been nice to have found those in my initial search (I obviously didn’t use a detailed enough phrase). But you know what? I’m still going to keep this post up because of all the time I spent writing it, taking the screenshots, and drawing those terrible circles and arrows, so there.