Here's How to Organize Your Content for Instagram

Jenn Herman

August 30, 2015

The reality is that Instagram is supposed to be “instant”. We’re supposed to share spontaneous and exciting moments of our lives to Instagram as they happen. But, let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re using Instagram for marketing and for your business. So, while those “instant” moments are great, and we’d like to incorporate as many as possible, chances are most of your posts are planned, staged, edited, and scheduled for strategic purposes.

But if you’re doing this, you probably have a lot of content that you are shuffling around between your computer and mobile device(s). And we don’t want to lose any of that content, or waste your time trying to find everything! So, here are my best tips for how to organize your content for Instagram – and maybe help keep a little more of your precious sanity ?

You probably have a ton of “raw” or original photos that you like to use for marketing purposes. These may be from random shots on your phone or from a photographer at a photo shoot you did.

These raw photos may consist of “promotional” photos of you (or others on your team) that you use for marketing messages. You know the ones – big smiles, hands out in thin air so you place a logo or message above your hand, you pointing at nothing to be replaced with a product or message, or any other variety of this type of promo shot.

You may also have raw photos of landscapes, flowers, the sky, city scapes, and other random images. But these are those great, high quality photos that really stand out and represent your brand. You probably use text overlays or other methods to turn these images into messages, promo graphics, and other content with text or overlays.

Of course, you’ve created graphics over the past however long. Whether in a tool like Canva, or in Photoshop, or in an app on your phone. You have graphic content that either already says exactly what you need, or which a quick edit would give you the perfect piece of content for Instagram this week.

And I’m sure you have a bunch of photos of your products or workplace or behind-the-scenes business content.

I’m willing to put money on the fact that you have all of this content – and yet it’s all scattered between your computer and your mobile device (or more than one mobile device!). So when the time comes to edit or create a new piece of content you’re looking everywhere for where it’s saved, right?

Get Everything in ONE Place

Is it in your camera roll? Is it in a folder on your tablet? Is it saved somewhere on your computer? Or is it still in a Dropbox folder that someone shared with you?

I know. I’ve been there! And you’ll spend more time trying to find the dang photo than actually editing it!

So you need to get everything in an organized fashion in one place. You choose what works for you. If working from your computer is where you do most of your work and content editing, then get ALL of your content from your mobile device onto your computer. If you would rather edit and work on your tablet or mobile device, then get everything from your computer onto the device. Or put it all on a thumb drive that works on both devices! Whatever the case, get everything in one place.

Easy enough, right?

Well, maybe not. Ok, it is… but you might need some “support” to do this. How are you supposed to get everything onto one device?

Sure, you could email yourself the content and then download it from the email to the desired device. But this takes time and email servers have size restrictions which may mean you have to email yourself 10 emails to get your content moved. And then, can you be sure you got everything?

Organizing Tips

So what else can you do? Here are some other ways to get all your content from multiple devices to one:

Sync your mobile device and computer. Use that fancy little cord they give you with your mobile device (the USB to mini USB one) and plug your mobile device into your computer. Transfer all your files from the mobile device to the computer. It may take a little while, but now you’re all backed up and your photo files are all in one place.
Use Dropbox. Put Dropbox on both your computer and your mobile device and upload all your photo content to either one. You will now have access to all those files on the other device.
Use PhotoSync. This tool requires you to install an app on your mobile device (iOS or Android) and on your computer. Both devices must be running on the same wi-fi at the time of syncing for files to transfer. This will allow you to send bulk amounts of files back and forth between your mobile device and your computer.

Organize the “Types” of Photos

So, the good news is that now you have everything on one device. I can promise you that your time searching for content has just decreased dramatically!

But there’s more you need to do to really organize your content for Instagram.

You need to separate the “types” of content. I mentioned above the various types of content that you likely have stored and use frequently. So create folders on your preferred device that correspond to those categories.

Consider categories like:

Promotional images
Background images
Product or workplace images
Graphic templates and backgrounds
Marketing promos
Seasonal images

You might find other categories that work better for you. That’s fine! It’s all about what keeps you the most organized.

An added note, if you have more than one “branch” of your business, or if you manage accounts for multiple clients, or have other reasons to have even more content, you’ll want to take this organization one level higher and separate all the content based on those categories too.

The great thing is that now every time you want to create new content, you have everything in one device, and organized in folders that make it easy to find what you want quickly and easily! You will save a ton of time and be so grateful for the ease of this organization.

Originally titled “How to Organize Your Content for Instagram” on jennstrends.com, and is republished here with permission

Image attribution: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/help-me-organize-content-alan-lepofsky

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Jenn Herman

Jenn Herman is a social media strategist and Instagram advocate who writes a blog focused on understanding trends in social media management. She provides tips, resources, and training for small to medium sized businesses that need to structure their social media strategies for success. Her business background includes Administration, Sales, Human Resources, and Marketing. If you would like to learn more about how to use Instagram, you can download "The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Instagram" here.