Posting to Instagram from desktop is one of the best ways to save time and improve your efficiency – especially if you regularly create assets using desktop design apps.
Prepping Instagram posts from a PC or Mac also means you get to review your images and videos on a bigger screen and write your captions from a full keyboard, which, spoiler alert, is a serious upgrade.
How to Post on Instagram from Desktop
Instagram now allows users to post Feed images or videos (up to 1 minute in length) from the desktop app.
Log in to your Instagram account on a PC or Mac and select the “+” icon at the top of the screen.
From here, you can drag and drop media from your computer, apply any of Instagram’s built-in filters and make image adjustments, write your caption and alt text, add a location, and turn off commenting.
You can also click on the image or video to search for and tag a user. When you’re all done, hit “Share” to publish directly to your feed.
Instagram desktop posting is a great new feature – but it does have several drawbacks. For example, you can’t schedule a post in advance, or preview how your feed will look before you hit publish.
Which is where Later’s easy-to-use desktop app steps in.
Why Later Is the Best Tool for Posting to Instagram from Desktop
Later is a social media scheduling tool that allows you to batch prep your posts on desktop and schedule them to automatically publish at your best times to post.
You can curate lists of Saved Captions that you can add in one click, quickly browse and add relevant hashtags using Later’s Suggested Hashtag feature, and schedule a first comment to go live at exactly the same time as the post goes live.
There are literally dozens of added benefits that come with using Later’s desktop app to plan and schedule your social media posts.
For example, you can simultaneously schedule posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn all from one dashboard.
Another major advantage is that you can preview how your feed will look before you post – so you can always make sure your composition is perfect for your brand.
Drag and drop your posts in the Visual Planner tool until you’ve found the perfect aesthetic – and once you hit save, your publishing schedule will automatically update to reflect the latest changes.
Content backlog running low? Later’s built-in user-generated content tools mean you can always find content to add to your media library!
Plus, scheduling with Later also means you can create a clickable version of your Instagram feed that you can add to your link in bio.
You can add button links to the top of your Linkin.bio landing page. Check out how we do this on the Later Instagram account – it’s perfect for driving more traffic back to your site.
And that’s not all – you can track every Instagram engagement you receive using Later’s built-in analytics dashboard. It’s easy-to-use and super visual, so you can get to the data that matters in seconds.
We could go on, but we know how valuable time is when you work in social media – we’ve created all Later’s features with this in mind.
Check it out for yourself today, for free. You won’t regret it.
NOTE: Some Later features mentioned above are only available on Growth or Advanced plans. All core scheduling features are available on Later's Free plan. Discover the full Pricing breakdown here.
