Late last year I wrote about a nearly perfect Mac Instagram app. Instagram is used often in the school where I work in Chicago. To the best of my knowledge, most the few thousand students, faculty, and staff have smartphones (iPhone or Android), and most of those use Instagram (SnapChat is growing, though).
Until recently Mac users with photos to share were kinda sorta mostly left in the dark because Instagram didn’t want photo uploads to come from anything but the Instagram app and that was only available on mobile devices. Thankfully, that has changed so now if you want to upload photos from Photos on your Mac all you need is InstaMaster and no money.
Full Square Circle
InstaMaster is much like Instagram on the Mac but it’s missing a few features, some of which can be forgiven thanks to the price tag. It’s cheap. You can use InstaMaster to view Instagram feeds, popular and nearby photos and videos included. The real secret here is that InstaMaster also lets you upload photos from your Mac to your Instagram account.
That means you can use InstaMaster to upload photos, like specific photos, comment on photos, search Instagram users and follow those you like (or that allow you), use tags and places.
What you cannot do in InstaMaster is edit photos the way you can in the Instagram app for iPhone. Only square photos can be uploaded in InstaMaster so you’ll need to edit them in Preview or take a chance that InstaMaster doesn’t crop your bigger photo in crazy places.
What’s not to like? It’s cheap. It works. Mostly.
Mostly?
Download InstaMaster from the Mac App Store and view the reviews. In the past, reviews were decidedly mixed with nearly as many one star reviews as five star reviews. Why? Earlier versions of InstaMaster were somewhat buggy but the app has improved over time and most of the recent reviews are the same; four or five stars.
That bodes well for the future except for one thing. Instagram can change how it receives photos at any time from its mobile and that could render InstaMaster useless until the next update. Otherwise, what you get for a few dollars is a Mac app that can upload photos and videos to your Instagram account.
What’s missing? Besides the limitation to square photos? Editing would be great, Instagram-like. So would some statistics on that Instagram accounts viewers, and speaking of that, an option for multiple accounts would be a plus.
