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Comment by bgarbiak | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is perfectly usable as a website, at least on an iPhone. I guess some features might be missing, but the core stuff is there: browsing, adding photo, filters, stories.

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How do you post a photo on instagram in a web browser? I thought that was reserved for the app.

You can post a photo on instagram in a browser on iphone. you also can on other platforms by changing your useragent to webkit

Add a file input -> the users taps it -> ios asks if they want to use an existing photo or take a new one -> take a new photo. Result on android may differ.

Interesting, they don’t seem to allow this on the desktop browser. Changing the user-agent yo a mobile browser exposes it. What a strange decision.

I don’t use Instagram so can’t check the code, but I would guess they use something like

    <input type="file" accept="image/*" capture>

Which does what you’d expect on a mobile device (launch the camera) but behaves differently on desktops (opens a file upload dialog). They may have decided that this behavior would confuse users.

How do you ensure that a client only sees a picture/video once and can't save it?

The photos are available as publicly accessible jpgs through http. They’re not really trying to do that.

You can't ensure this natively either.

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