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I begrudgingly started an insta a few days ago. I am a photographer and I have resisted for so long. But this isolation just made me want to stay connected to m

I begrudgingly started an insta a few days ago. I am a photographer and I have resisted for so long. But this isolation just made me want to stay connected to my classmates and other photographer friends. I have to say, as a photo sharing platform, instagram is awful. Can't upload photos from desktop, no native iPad app (WTF?), and whatever compression they use to display my photos seems to really mess with the quality (not really noticeable from a phone, but from a desktop, yikes). It's great to be able to keep up with people in a more meaningful way, and I did attend a pretty cool live IGTV session, but all in all I don't really like it. And as others have mentioned, I think, you can just middle-click on a post to open it in a new tab and it wont ask for a login.

pmlnr 6y ago
> Can't upload photos from desktop Yes, you can. Open dev tools, set it to mobile, and set it to android. A "+" button will pop up and work fine.
- dillutedfixer 6y ago
  Nice! That does work. Thanks for that. I'm still a little baffled as to why they don't just allow that on the desktop site, though.
  - morphicpro 6y ago
    I would put my money on they don't want to have to support server side image processing. Since their mobile apps all scale images client side its a huge cost savings vs having to support that server side.
  - dingaling 6y ago
    Because Instagram isn't really intended for sharing your DLSR-shot, desktop-processed labour-of-love photo. The compression, rescaling and colour mismanagement they apply to uploads should tell you that. It's quite possibly the worst way on the Web to present photos-as-art yet photographers keep signing up to it.
    - bscphil 6y ago
      Meanwhile, Twitter, also not designed for this purpose, actually stopped recompressing (jpeg) files when viewed at the highest quality. https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien/status/1204557498990002176 https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien/status/1204557498990002176 I was actually pretty impressed by this change from a non-photo site.
- dillutedfixer 6y ago
  Well I spoke too soon. Initially I did see the controls pop up on the bottom, but I just resized my browser window, and now for the life of me cannot get them to show up again. Oh well. I'll keep messing with it.

pmlnr 6y ago

> Can't upload photos from desktop Yes, you can. Open dev tools, set it to mobile, and set it to android. A "+" button will pop up and work fine.

dillutedfixer 6y ago
Nice! That does work. Thanks for that. I'm still a little baffled as to why they don't just allow that on the desktop site, though.
- morphicpro 6y ago
  I would put my money on they don't want to have to support server side image processing. Since their mobile apps all scale images client side its a huge cost savings vs having to support that server side.
- dingaling 6y ago
  Because Instagram isn't really intended for sharing your DLSR-shot, desktop-processed labour-of-love photo. The compression, rescaling and colour mismanagement they apply to uploads should tell you that. It's quite possibly the worst way on the Web to present photos-as-art yet photographers keep signing up to it.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    Meanwhile, Twitter, also not designed for this purpose, actually stopped recompressing (jpeg) files when viewed at the highest quality. https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien/status/1204557498990002176 https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien/status/1204557498990002176 I was actually pretty impressed by this change from a non-photo site.
dillutedfixer 6y ago
Well I spoke too soon. Initially I did see the controls pop up on the bottom, but I just resized my browser window, and now for the life of me cannot get them to show up again. Oh well. I'll keep messing with it.