Instagram is a fantastic social media platform for sharing photos through either your feed or your Story, which means there are many different types of medium to share. And with a variety of content to create, comes a variety of apps to help!

Here are the apps I have on my phone to help me present the best Instagram content.

Content for my Instagram Feed

Camera

Seems a tad obvious to put this one in here, but I use my iPhone camera to take my Instagram photos. I used to use a Sony A6000, but the effort it took to set up each shot and edit it was taking me so long, that I made the switch to iPhone. Since doing that, I won’t be changing back. My phone camera provides some fantastic quality photos that are definitely suitable for Instagram and with the iPhone photo editing tool I’m able to brighten or dull them to suit my editing needs.

Planoly

This is a superb app that I always rave about. It’s a planning tool that allows you to view your Instagram posts in a grid format before you post them. The aim is to show you what the photos will look together, you can see if they match and if you’re happy with how it looks. You can also plan out your captions in this app and even post out directly from within the app if you want to schedule in your posts.

I have paid to unlock more featured of this app, but it is also very useable for free.

VSCO

The editing app of my dream. Will a really good selection of filters that are completely customisable, VSCO lets you make Instagram your own. You can save one filter of your choice for free, but the customisation you can do to this filter means you can make it as unique as possible. A brilliant hack is to search VSCO Instagram filter on Pinterest, you’ll see lots of photos with a variety of filters and the name of the filter plus how they edited it. If you have a feed theme in mind, this can help you find the right filter for you, a lot quicker.

• Read more about themes on Instagram and if they could benefit you
• I’ve answered your most asked questions about Instagram

Content for my Instagram Stories

A Design Kit

This app is perfect for creating Instagram Stories that stand out. You can add text and icons, including shapes, illustrations and stickers and make your Story posts look however you choose. I often use this app to add in shapes to my Story if I want to highlight something, or perhaps to add a dark box with text over an image to focus on a particular message. This is a fantastic app to play around with and discover new features.

mojo

This takes aesthetic Story designs to a new level. Mojo is a video app that allows you to drop your images into animated video clips for your Instagram Story. These are customisable within reason and offer a variety of text effects and transitions in the free version. This will make your Stories look very professional and offer something different than just an image with text on top.

Unfold

Similar to mojo, Unfold is for the very pretty Instagram Story creators among you. It allows you to use templates to upload content with text to your Stories that look different from just a photo dropped in with the text. You can buy more templates, but a lot is available on Unfold for free, including a range of colour customisations, text and templates to drop your photos into.

Canva

I don’t use this app as much as the others because I think Canva works better on a desktop. But this is an incredibly customisable app for content creators and works similarly to Photoshop, but with templates. It allows you to customise content and size it for any social media platform, using brand colours (you can save two for free) and a range of fonts, icons and shapes. Canva is a very good tool to get the hang of using and a free alternative to Photoshop.