How to transfer photos to your iPhone to post on Instagram

I love Instagram and get lots of interaction on my numerous accounts. But my one complaint about it is that you can’t post from your computer – only from a phone or tablet via the Instagram app. That’s fine when you’re using images you’ve taken on your phone, but what if you want to post a photo on Instagram that you’ve taken on your DSLR or an image you’ve created in graphics software, for instance? You need to transfer those images to your device so you can choose them in Instagram.

There are lots of different ways to do this but here are my favourites.

• When I’m feeling organised and I have several photos ready to post over the week or even month, I use later.com.  It’s free and it allows you to create all your posts online (images and captions) and schedule when you want to post them. It won’t actually post them for you as Instagram doesn’t permit this. Instead, you install the Later app on your phone and it will pop up with a reminder at the scheduled time, copy your photo into Instagram for you, then ask you to paste the caption you’ve created into the usual place on Instagram (it’s already copied the caption you created into the clipboard so you don’t have to type it all in again).
• When it’s just one photo and I haven’t already shared it on Facebook or Twitter, I email it to myself then open the email on my phone and save the attachment to my camera roll.
• When it’s just one photo and I have shared it on Facebook or Twitter, I open the post or tweet, hold down my finger on the photo until a menu of options appears. Choose the “Save image” option to save the image to the camera roll.
• When I’ve got several photos but I haven’t got the time to schedule them in, I upload to Dropbox.com, then use the Dropbox app to download them to my phone so I can upload them to Instagram when I’m ready.

Hope that helps. If you’ve got other more efficient ways to get images into Instagram, do let me know in the comments box.

And if you want to follow me on Instagram, my main account is @linscan