You're right that there's no automatic way to auto-post photos on Instagram from other channels or sources. I'm thinking that's probably a good thing, particularly when I think about the 35-odd photos I uploaded as a gallery to Facebook last weekend after a photo safari at the local national park. Indeed, one of the things I like about Instagram is that it's a constant stream of "Instamatic" snapshots, a window into the daily lives and activities of the people I follow. At least, in theory. :-)

Having said that, there are ways that you can post the same photo twice, starting with the obvious: if it's a photograph that you took on your mobile device, it's easy to post it on Facebook, copy the comment you left there, then post it again on Instagram, pasting the comment so they match. Then again, in that case, just start on Instagram and take advantage of the one-way pipe to Facebook and simplify things.

What's more likely is that you're talking about photos and other images that appear on Facebook but aren't photos you've taken on your mobile devices. Heck, they might not even be your images (though I should hasten to add that there's a potential copyright issue you might or might not care about in that instance).

In the latter case, here's how I repost photos on my Facebook news stream into Instagram. It's the iPhone solution, but the Android approach would be quite similar...

Here's an image I posted on Facebook with a few comments and likes already accumulated, as shown in the Facebook iPhone app:

Tapping and holding my finger on the image itself offers up the option of saving the image onto my mobile device:

Choosing "Save Photo" now gives me the image on the iPhone, making it easy to proceed once I launch Instagram:

I'm going to approach this differently, however, once we're in Instagram by showing how I can simply take a screenshot on the iPhone (push the home and top edge buttons simultaneously to take a screen capture on the device).

Let's launch Instagram, just in time to see a very cute photo from jprenticeparton:

To add a new photo of my own, I tap on the camera icon along the bottom, then the library icon. That gets me here:

"Camera Roll" are the photos I've taken -- or downloaded, or saved -- on the device, that's where both the saved Disneyland image and the screen capture will be found. Here's the latter:

It's a bit confusing, but the very bottom options, Cancel and Choose, are part of Instagram. I'll use the two-fingers-spread gesture to zoom in on the image until all I can see are the edges of the ticket book with the different letter values highlighted:

At this point, I'll now tap "Choose" since it's now ready to post. I can apply various filters, but in this case I'll just leave the image as is and enter a caption:

The only comment I'd add here is that it probably doesn't make sense to share this on Facebook since that's where the image came from in the first place, but if you have tolerant Facebook pals, you can perhaps get away with having the image show up twice. Your call.

And, finally, here's my Facebook image reposted on Instagram:

That's how I'd do it, with some variations shown so you can find your own favorite approach.

And if you'd like to follow me on Instagram? Look for d1taylor or just go here: instagram.com/d1taylor.