I don’t have Instagram installed on my iPhone anymore, and haven’t had it on my iPhone for more than a few years. The primary reason is Facebook’s total lack of ethics in regards to privacy, along whatever other nefarious deeds it wishes to perform on my iPhone through their apps. And that includes Facebook and every other Facebook controlled app.

I still have my Instagram account, and I still upload photos from time to time. I do that via my personal computer and Google Chrome (the irony of using one privacy abusing company’s tool to circumvent another’s privacy abusing tool isn’t lost on me). I did this in the beginning because I take the majority of my photos with my cameras, and in spite of trying to do all my post processing on my iPhone, in the end I still go back to my PC and its photo post-processing tools because the combination is so superior to the smart phone and its apps.

When I want to upload photos I’ve finished processing to Instagram, I go to the website and then right click on the page, anywhere really.

It looks pretty much as you would see on the app, with one major exception. You don’t have the button to add any photos. To get that button you right click on the page (anywhere that’s not an active link) to get a property menu.

You want to click on Inspect. When you do you’ll get the following rather frightening looking page.

I think it’s rather impressive looking, and there’s a lot in the code I find fascinating. But I would, me being me. The problem of uploading is still there, that being no upload button. What you want to do is go up to the little itty bitty icon that sits in the upper left corner of the middle panel of code. It looks like an outline of a smart phone over an outline of a tablet. If you hover the mouse over it, it will display “Toggle device toolbar,” which is where the button is located. If you click that you’ll get the following:

It’s now closer looking to the mobile app, but it’s still missing the vital button. Now refresh the page to get to the final result:

Now you have your upload button at the bottom. From this point forward every time you want to add a photo you can. Just click that button. What I find interesting is that when the mouse icon moves over the Instagram button it turns into a round translucent gray ball, just like the mouse pointer on the iPad with the latest versions of iPadOS. Which I find amusing as there is no tablet version of Instagram.

One more note: if you leave this page, and then come back and redo all of this, it will remember the state of the “Toggle device toolbar” toggle.

Is this better than the app? Not really. In particular, it doesn’t know about your location, so if you want to add a location using the desktop version then you’re out of luck. I personally don’t like to do that anymore. When I did add a location, I tended to obfuscate my exact location. Now I don’t bother.