I hope this technique is as helpful for you as it has been for me. It’s well known that you can only post to Instagram from your phone app. Which means you’ve probably done all kinds of digital gymnastics in order to get your best photos onto your phone to share. Many people upload them to Dropbox or another file-sharing site, then download to their phones. I thought I had a good system, which was to use Lightroom mobile to sync photos between my desktop and phone.

But this is better. Soooooo much better.

The Lr Mobile and Dropbox solutions are a little buggy and sometimes don’t synchronize the photos. Most of all, they still require that you use the phone to do the posting. Also, you can’t use the return key to leave a space between paragraphs. That means you have to compose your post in another app then copy and paste to Instagram to have any degree of formatting. But now you can format your posts and type with a genuine keyboard instead of fat-fingering your way through a typo-ridden paragraph in the Instagram app. Here’s what you do.

Using Google Chrome

If you’re not using Google’s Chrome browser, it’s a great browser to get you going on this Instagram solution and it’s my favorite browser. In this case, Chrome lets you view the code for all parts of a webpage, and allows you to view it as if you were using a mobile device.

You can also use Apple’s Safari and Microsoft Edge, by turning on Developer mode and changing the User Agent to an iPhone or other smartphone.

You DON’T need to know how to code

A. Don’t freak out — I don’t know anything about coding, either. All you do is go to Instagram.com, then right-click on a blank area of the page. Choose Inspect and your window will split and give you a view of the code on the page.

B. Ignore all that colorful gibberish. All you need to do is click on the icon at the top left that looks like a smartphone and a tablet. This changes the view in your page to how it would look for a mobile device.

C. Click to refresh the webpage and now you can see the controls you usually see in the Instagram app, including the + button to add a new post. Keep the Inspect pane open.

Start posting

When you click the + button, you’ll be able to navigate to anyplace your pictures are on your computer. You can now post to Instagram from your computer and share your best pictures however you like — including with watermarks and all the finishing you’ve done.

Instagram is a terrific tool for sharing your photos, and now that you know how to post directly from your computer, you can share your best pictures and even type a decent paragraph to go with them. Happy posting.