If you are a photographer on Instagram, you know that there are two major headaches when it comes to posting your photos:
- You can’t schedule Instagram posts.
- You have to upload images and write captions from a mobile device.
If you are looking for a much more efficient way to manage your Instagram profile, you might want to try Later.com
Later.com allows you to upload images directly from Dropbox or Google Drive, or from any other local storage on your computer, phone or tablet. You can then schedule posts and write captions directly in the Later web interface (or using the phone / tablet app).
Later.com is free to schedule up to 30 photo posts per month across two separate Instagram profiles. If you need more than that you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan (starting at $19/month).
Although Later allows you to schedule Instagram posts in advance, due to restrictions with the Instagram API Later can’t actually post directly to Instagram. The workaround is for Later to send your phone/tablet a notification when an Instagram post is scheduled which then allows you to open the Instagram app on your mobile device and complete the post. Captions are simply pasted into the caption field on the app.
It would be nice for Later to be able to post directly to Instagram so that this step could be skipped – but this would be against Instagram’s current terms of service.
Besides the ease of being able to schedule Instagram posts, upload images and write captions from a computer (as opposed to being restricted to a phone or tablet), there are a couple of other features that I really like.
Later.com lets you schedule Instagram posts across multiple accounts which is really handy (for example if you have both personal and business Instagram accounts).
Later also sorts your uploaded photos into “Unused Media” and “Used Media” so you don’t have to manually track which photos you have already posted and which have not been scheduled.
If there is one thing that I would like to see improved its the ability to search hashtags and user names from within the Later interface (when you are in the Instagram app and you start typing a hashtag or user name, you will get a list of suggestions which makes it much simpler to tag your images).
What Do You Think
Give Later.com a try and let us know what you think!
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