Leverage PhotoDesk to increase your reach

PhotoDesk 2.3.7 introduced a very handy new feature that is a key stone of improving your Instagram account in order to gain more followers. The feature lets you easily add more tags to your images, so that they can be found better. This post will explain how to achieve that.

Why would you do this?

Many people search Instagram for photos that belong to a particular tag. Either directly in the Instagram app, or with a useful tool like PhotoDesk. You can tap into this by adding many tags to your pictures. Research has shown that the more tags you add, the more likes you'll get. That's why you'll frequently see images that have many, many tags in the list of popular images.

However, writing all these tags by hand is cumbersome and takes time, especially on a mobile device keyboard (like the iPhone keyboard or an Android keyboard).

This tutorial shows how to do the same right from within PhotoDesk, without having to type much.

How it works

Instagram has a great function, that PhotoDesk utilizes. Instagram does not let third party apps like PhotoDesk upload or edit any images. But what it does allow, is adding comments to an existing image. If this comment contains tags, and you're the author of that image (that is, if you're commenting on one of your own images), then any tags that are part of your comment will be added to your image. So just by commenting with tags, you can add additional tags to your image.

I'll now explain two different methods for doing this.

Favorite Sidebar Tags

The first way, to achieve this, are favorite sidebar tags. Favorite tags allow you to define tags, that you really like, within PhotoDesk. These tags appear in the left sidebar and give you easy notification whenever new images for this tag are being added.

PhotoDesk 2.3.7 introduces a new feature that allows you to add all of your current favorite sidebar tags to an image.

So if you have the sidebar tags #newyork, #manhattan, and #bestcity and you want to tag your new uploaded image with these tags, this is how you do it:

1. Go to "My Pictures"
2. Select the image you want to tag (you can also select multiple images)
3. In the popup menu, click "Add Favorite Tags..."
4. PhotoDesk will show you the tags that it is going to post, and ask for confirmation
5. Click "Yes, post Comment" to finish the process.

Next, PhotoDesk will automatically post the requested comment to the selected image(s).

This only works for tags that you added to your sidebar, not for normal Favorite Tags.

Comment Templates

Comment Templates is a great PhotoDesk feature that allows you to pre-define text snippets that can be added to as a comment to any image. You can even automatically replace certain words in there (like the author of the image in question). Obviously, Comment Templates are also a great way to add tag comments to your images.

They work especially well if you wish to post different tags to your images, based on some kind of category that the image in question belongs to. Say you generally post images that are either about "Travelling" or about "Videogames". Then you can simply create two comment templates with the following contents:

Travelling: #travel #vacation #holiday #travelling #world #nomad #asia #europa #america #usa #china #australia

Videogames: #PS4 #DS #XBOX #Mario #Link #GTA

You create these Comment Templates as follows:

1. Select "File" in the Main Menu
2. Select "Manage Templates..."
3. Click the "Add" button
4. Enter the title of the template (say "Videogames")
5. Enter the text of the template (say "#PS4 #DS #XBOX #Mario #Link #GTA")
6. Click the "Save" button.

Then, after you posted one or more pictures, you simply:

1. Right click the image in question
2. Select "Comment 1 Item"
3. Select your desired template (say "Videogames")

Now PhotoDesk will automatically post the requested tags as a comment to your image.

Thanks for your time!

Benedikt