Photographers: What you’re looking for is Windowed
Instagram, the social network of choice for most photographers looking to promote their work, is also the greatest annoyance due to not allowing photographers the ability (mostly) to upload images to the service from a computer. A new app called Windowed is looking to change that, and it’s free. Best of all for most photographers, that doesn’t mean you need to have a Windows machine only to post!
Developed by Felix Sun, Windowed works by essentially acting like a mobile browser, tricking Instagram into thinking you are viewing it from a mobile device – unlocking the ability to post images. It works as well as using Instagram in any other mobile browser, so not quite as well as the full app, but definitely well enough to post an image to your feed.
It should be noted though, that at least on Windows, users have been able to download and use the Instagram app for some time and post to the social network – with the one caveat being that posting images was limited to laptops with touchscreens (as well as some app instability issues). However, for laptop and desktop users not sporting a touch screen, Windowed appears to be a solution.
The other caveat here to using Windowed is that it is in this grey area where technically you are probably breaking Instagram’s ToS using it, but it’s not clear how enforceable that is to Instagram at this point without blocking all mobile browser access, which we think is highly unlikely.
So, for now anyway, Windowed looks like an excellent solution for those looking to post a quick image from your computer without having to play data tag messaging or drop boxing or emailing or whatever other solution you use to transfer the file to your mobile to post. As previously noted, Windowed is free and you can download it over on its website – here.
