I’m really conflicted by Instagram. Everyone says as a photographer you need to be on Instagram for the exposure and that is probably true. The problem is that Instagram doesn’t make it easy as a photographer to post pictures and once posted Instagram’s interface leaves a lot to be desired. If you are using Instagram as a portfolio you need to have absolute control of the image before it is posted.

First off is getting your images to Instagram. Unless you take your images directly on your phone and do all your post processing there you have to jump thru hoops to get you images published. If I have a choice between processing an image on a profiled 27″ monitor or a smart phone screen I will pick the monitor 100% of the time. My workflow for getting a image on to Instagram is as follows.

1. Process image in Lightroom and (if necessary) Photoshop on 27″ iMac.
2. Publish jpeg to a Google Drive Folder then wait for image to sync.
3. Open Google Drive on  Nexus 7.
4. Navigate to the same Google Drive Folder.
5. Click on image to load it to device.
6. Click on the three dots in upper right of image.
7. Click on Send Copy To
8. Choose Instagram.

This will bring up the image in  Instagram. You can then change the crop from square to correct aspect ratio for the image. You can also apply one of the Instagram filters although I can’t see any reason for changing the image that you have already processed. Then add your caption and post.

While this will get your images into Instagram there are a number of things about Instagram’s interface that still bug me. Like the fact there is no way to quickly get back to the top once you’ve scrolled down through the stream of images from the people you follow. On the web based Instagram you normally can click on the header of a page for a refresh but not with Instagram. You can not zoom into an image to get detailed look. On the iPad/Nexus 7 you can only view the images in portrait mode which means an iPad with a keyboard attached makes it very hard to enter text for captions as you have to sort of tilt your head to see what you’ve written or try to type accordion style with one hand on the keyboard. And on the  iPad you can look at the images at 1x, the same size as an iPhone, or at 2x which reduces the quality of the to fill the screen.

Instagram seems to make it much easier to post a badly lit over processed selfie then your good work.

Well I’m glad I got that off my chest. And BTW my here is link to my Instagram account.

For those of you wondering how I publish directly from Lightroom to the Google Drive here is how I’ve got things set up in Lightroom’s Publishing Manager.