Simply put, there is likely no easier way to upload images from your computer to Instagram than with this plug-in.

Hardly a week ago I wrote about Pixbuf and it’s ability to do this very thing; to upload image from your computer to Instagram. And of course, in that post, there was due mention of Schedugram as the more potent, expensive alternative to Pixbuf.

Schedugram, in many ways, is the refined version of Pixbuf, and more feature-rich. Arguably, if you’re a large business, or at least a prolific and meticulous Instagram poster, Schedugram is what you’ll want, and the cost of it is a mere triviality. You can schedule with ease, crop an image within the program to fit IG’s finicky parameters, and so on. It’s what we use at SLRL. Though, perhaps not for long.

CaptureMonkey is known for making some nice, simple, but effective plugins for photographers, typically released with little to no fanfare, and generally offering free versions and full-fledged versions for cheap. I’m personally a fan of their Fader plugin for Lightroom, which is some 5 years old now, and is essentially an opacity slider for LR. It allows you to apply all the adjustments to your image (t literally breathes a whole new life into your favorite Lightroom presets), tweak, and then use a single slider to adjust the strength of the effects – it’s brilliant, and so is this LR/Instagram plugin.

LR/Instagram

Because Lightroom maintains such dominance in the market, there’s a good chance you have it and use it as your primary post processing application. So if you live in that ‘space’ you’ll love this plug-in; it’s free to download and try, and you can get full registration for only $10.

Within about a minute you’ll go through the typical steps to install a plug-in in LR, and while setting up the new service in Lightroom’s Publishing Manager you can authenticate you Instagram account right from there. In fact, you can even do it for multiple accounts simply by making new publishing collections. You can see here that I have already set mine up for my personal and SLRL accounts.

To use it all you need to do is drag your image into the Publish Collection…and hit publish. That’s it.

There’s no fuss, and neither does it seem to be an issue if your crop doesn’t fit Instagram’s 4:5 or 1.91:1 aspect ratio – at least not in the times I’ve now used it. If your image doesn’t fit those parameters, the plugin simply adds the white border around it so it does. And that’s great, but you can, however, do a force crop for IG if you so desire.

[REWIND: 2 TOOLS THAT OPEN THE TAPS ON LIGHTROOM’S DEVELOP MODULE & PRESETS]

If you’re wondering how you’re going to insert all those hashtags and a caption, well, LR/Instagram provides a new metadata panel, allowing you to add hashtags to caption, only to be published to Instagram. You can also select a custom template, and specify format using {template} tags.

And that’s all she wrote really. It does what it claims, and works like a charm for me. You can find it here.