Instagram Disappoints Me

Note: originally published June 14, 2016; updated 10/17/2017 for optimization, and new content at the end.

Instagram is fun. I like sharing some of my phone photos. And, let’s face facts–fancy filters notwithstanding, a good portion of the photos on Instagram are really simple phone photos. Yes, the latest iPhones and Android phones have some nice cameras. But they’re still phone cameras and lack the depth and creativity I can get with my DLSR. And I can’t share my best photos on Instagram.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true. I can share my best stuff, but it’s difficult.

DIFFICULT? HOW SO?

Instagram is committed to being a mobile-device-only platform, and it’s doing a great job of that. I don’t know what would be so bad about having a web interface, but maybe the focus of the company is to force us to think about our phone cameras as “real” cameras. They’re not.

Well, no, that’s not entirely true, either. They are real cameras, just not real good cameras.

Now the images I see from National Geographic on Instagram–I’d be really surprised if some of those were taken with a phone camera.

So I will try to find a simpler way to post my better shots to Instagram. If I can’t find something that doesn’t take six steps, Instagram will only ever get my crappy phone camera shots.

UPDATE:

While cruising through my RSS feeds I found a Chrome plug-in called Chrome UA Spoofer.  This nifty little thing lets me change the way the Chrome browser presents me to the web. Left “off,” I am seen to the world as a user on a laptop or desktop. However, I can switch it to present me as an iPhone or iPad user, an Android user, a Windows Phone user, an Internet Explorer user, a Firefox user, a Safari user, or an Opera user. When I want to post a photo to Instagram from my laptop, I change my state to iOS, and Instagram lets me post photos from my computer. I need to remember to turn it back to Chrome when I’m finished.  Once when i was trying to delete an account, the site kept telling me I couldn’t do that from a mobile device, only from the full website. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and I felt less than brilliant when I realized it.