Instagram is finally making use of their mobile site, including adding the ability to upload pictures from your phone’s browser.
Head to instagram.com on your phone and you’ll be greeted with a look similar to the app. Though it looks like a web clone, the mobile site has limited functionality.
Like the app, tapping the camera icon brings up options to upload a picture from your phone. Unfortunately, you won’t find any editing tools on the mobile site. You can’t crop pictures or apply filters to them. There also aren’t any options to add a location or tag someone.
You can choose the format of your picture (square, landscape or portrait) and add a caption. Hashtag addicts won’t find any auto-suggestions when adding tags to captions.
Stick With Instagram’s App… For Now
All in all, Instagram’s mobile site now has a bare bones picture uploader. If you prep and perfect your pictures without Instagram, the mobile site could be a simple way to upload photos. You can use it to check your feed, notifications, search Instagram and view a limited Discovery tab.
However, if you depend on Stories, videos, filters and DMs, stick with the app.
To access the mobile site on a desktop browser, use a browser agent spoofer with a mobile browser profile. Alternatively, Firefox users can head to Instagram.com and in the Firefox settings menu select Developer > Responsive Design Mode. Add the following text to the custom user agent box:
Mozilla/5.0 (Android 4.4; Mobile; rv:41.0) Gecko/41.0 Firefox/41.0