In all the time sucking manipulative apps I have ever installed on my phone, Instagram gets me every time. The Facebook affect has turned my once beloved app into a cesspool of attention-seeking posts that use all the UI tricks in the book to hook me in. It gets me every time. There are too many good things about it to stop using my account completely, so imagine my surprise when posting from the web became available.

As part of quite a few updates to the way Instagram works that are happening at the moment, Meta have launched web posting after announcing the upcoming feature in January. It’s a welcome feature to. Everyone who uses a camera knows the slight annoyance of editing your image in Lightroom after importing from an SD card. Only then having to save to Photos or send it to your phone to post to Instagram. Sure, it’s a first world problem, but it always felt like one that could be fixed. Instagram has a web interface, yet chose to close off parts of the experience to only mobile users — no doubt all in the pursuit of growth.

As much as I love using Glass there are far more people on Instagram and I find more posts of awesome pictures for me to look at. So sucking me straight in and wasting my time doesn’t take much doing, especially with all the wonderful autumn colours in new images being posted. Thankfully, I am awe of this and try to limit my usage or not have the app installed unless I want to post. It feels like this update is for people like me to solve the two issues pointed out above but still get usage.

It’s not perfect. There are still a few features missing from the web experience, such as editing previously posted images, but it’s a gigantic improvement. Along with recently going back to allowing image previews on Twitter it’s great to see the service improving. If they could just get rid of the shopping tab and actually get interested in me adding photos again, that would be great!