Now over a decade old, Instagram remains one of the most popular photo and video sharing social networking platforms in the world. It has become quite the intergenerational thing, loved by millions (regardless of age) for its sleek design, easy-to-use interface, and, of course, for the insights into the lives of others which the app affords us – be it pictures of our sister’s new baby, our aunt’s vacation in the Caribbean, or the latest hilarious content from our favorite meme page.
And it’s supposed to be easy, right? We want to come home from a long day at work, sink into the sofa, and be able to quickly and easily scroll, swipe, and double-tap our way through our feed, our friends’ stories, the latest reels. On the iOS and Android versions of the app, doing so should pose little problem. For those of us who like to use Instagram on our PC’s, however, functionality does seem to drop off quite noticeably.
One of the major issues many seem to find is an apparent inability to swipe through a post with multiple photographs or videos – a post you’ll identify by the several small grey and blue dots below the first image. For a long time, the Instagram app for PC just did not have this functionality built-in. Thankfully, times have changed.
Here, then, are two ways you can swipe posts on the Instagram app for PC:
Swipe using your PC’s trackpad
- Open the Instagram application on your PC (or, if preferred, open your favorite browser and go to the Instagram website). Once there, sign in to your account.
- Navigate to Home by clicking the house-shaped icon in the upper-right hand corner.
- Locate a post with those blue and grey dots below the image, which I mentioned earlier. This indicates a post with multiple images included.
- Using two fingers, swipe horizontally across the trackpad, from right to left.
- You can now navigate through all of the images attached to this post, by swiping with two fingers either right or left, depending on which direction you wish to go.
Note: This method is sensitive to the force you use when swiping, and will (if the post contains more than two images) sometimes swipe quickly through multiple images. To avoid this, I recommend either being especially gentle when two-finger swiping, or using the following method instead.
Swipe using your PC’s mouse
- Open the Instagram application on your PC (or, if preferred, open your favorite browser and go to the Instagram website). Once there, sign in to your account.
- Navigate to Home by clicking the house-shaped icon in the upper-right hand corner.
- Locate a post with those blue and grey dots below the image, which I mentioned earlier. This indicates a post with multiple images included.
- Now, hovering your mouse over the post, you will see a small, semi-transparent arrow located center-right on the first image in the post. Click this arrow to swipe through to the next image.
- Repeat step 4, locating and clicking on the arrows placed center-right and center-left, to navigate through a post’s multiple images in whichever direction you prefer.
And there you have it! Whilst there is still some functionality that could be improved in the Instagram PC app, by following these simple steps, swiping on the PC app should never again be a problem.
