Post an older iPhone photo to Instagram?

That’s a great point, actually, because I do sometimes despair of our self-indulgent, narcissistic culture of always-on social networking, and there’s no place it’s more obvious than when you’re at a sporting event, concert or other live event and everyone’s filming it, taking photos, sharing with friends, posting to Facebook or Instagramming instead of actually enjoying the event itself. What’s the point of paying for a ticket to a concert if you’re just going to be filming it for your friends anyway? Do we need to impress each other that badly?

Oh, sorry, kinda ranting a bit here. 🙂

Still, don’t you sometimes wonder?

Anyway, yes, it’s entirely possible – and easy and unobtrusive – to take photos with your iPhone then later, when you’re at a café or sitting in your car relaxing post-event (or with a sleeping baby in the back seat) to post them to Instagram. The reason is that like most social networking services, Instagram uses the time-of-post not time-of-photo.

Here’s an example sequence, a photo I took at a Denver Outlaws lacrosse game a few days prior that’s still sitting in my Photo Album on my own iPhone. To start, launch Instagram…

Now along the bottom tap on the camera icon – the middle one – just as if you were going to take a live photo. 

It activates the camera, but you can ignore it:

Pay attention to the lower portion of the screen. The middle is a big blue button that lets you take a photo of whatever you’re viewing at the time (my living room isn’t very exciting, I admit). To the right is the video button that lets you switch to recording a brief video for posting to Instagram if you’re so inclined, and to the left is a tiny photo thumbnail that actually gains you access to your iPhone camera roll.

That’s the one we want. Tap on it.

This is a bit confusing because now you can see a set of photo thumbnails. Turns out you can make this portion of the screen bigger too, or it’ll just magically enlarge as you try to scroll down below what’s visible here.

Find the image you want and tap on it. It’s loaded into the Instagram app from the iPhone camera roll and you’ll be take to the standard Scale & Crop view:

Not the pic you want? You can tap on other thumbnail images at this point to step through and find the one you want. Or pinch, zoom, pan, and get the image oriented and sized as you want, then tap on “Crop” on the top right to proceed.

Now the part I like the most: stepping through photo filters to see which one makes your photo look the best:

Don’t forget to experiment with turning the frame on or off, tilt/shift blurring (the water drop icon) and boosting the contrast, all of which can be combined in interesting ways to make your photo more memorable.

Ready to proceed, filter chosen, etc? Tap on “Next” on the top right.

I always start by working on my caption, and don’t forget to add a hashtagged keyword or two to help the image be found by people who might not yet follow you. Then tag people as appropriate, specify where on a map the photo was take and decide what other social networking services you’d also like to share the final photo with in addition to Instagram.

Here’s what I settled upon for this particular LAX image:

All looks good. All that’s left to do is click on “Share” on the top right and it’s done!

Here’s the final result:

As you can see, nowhere along the process was there any indication that the photo was a few days old rather than one that was taken simultaneous to posting it.

Now, how can we get all those concertgoers to defer posting their own images until they get back home? 🙂