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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I was actually pretty impressed by this change from a non-photo site.

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