Instagram, the calendar, and feed preview
Three calendar views, a grid preview you can drag, and a schedule that waits for you to act.
Updated Aug 14, 20264 min readApplies to 1.1.5
Instagram is where most of us lose the first hour of the morning. les Archives is built to make that hour shorter and less reactive.
The Share walkthrough covers this calendar as well as Pinterest. The same recording sits on the Pinterest article, so if you've watched it there you've already seen this.
When publishing opens you'll need an Instagram Business account linked to a Facebook Page. A personal account won't work, and that's Meta's rule rather than ours. Worth setting up now if you aren't on one already.
The calendar
Share, Instagram, Calendar. Three views.
| View | Best for |
|---|---|
| Month | The shape of the month. Platform badges per day, click a day for detail |
| Week | Seven days with time rows. Planning something tight |
| Pipeline | Three columns, DRAFT, SCHEDULED and PUBLISHED, with a count on each. Drag cards between them |
The top bar carries Calendar, Queue and Export Posts.
Getting something onto it
From The Archive. Select frames, right-click, Send to Calendar. That opens a batch sheet: a starting date, a posting frequency of daily, every two days, every three days or weekly, a time slot, and the platforms to use. It spreads the selection across your calendar from that date. No hashtags field on it.
From the Queue. Open Queue in the top bar, then either drag a frame onto a slot on the calendar or double-click it and let us find the next open one. Either way the SCHEDULE IG POST sheet opens on that time. No date picker on this one, because the slot is the date. What it does have is your three cataloged caption options, Branded, SEO and Engagement, a tone and length control that will rewrite any of them, an editable text area, and an aspect-ratio crop you can drag.
From Carousel Studio. Finish the carousel and press Schedule. That sheet is one narrow column with the slide count, the date and time, Instagram, the caption and the creative partners. It shows no slides. Covered in full under Scheduling and exporting a carousel.
Feed preview
There is no Feed Preview tab. It lives in the calendar's right-hand column, at the bottom of the panel that also holds This Week and Up Next, and it shows when you haven't got a specific day open. A small phone mock with your planned posts in a three-column grid. EXPAND, or clicking the phone, opens it full size.
Everything you've planned appears in the order it will land, newest first, with drafts and posts pending review marked as held. Drag one planned item onto another and a dialog headed Swap or Reorder? asks which you meant.
| Button | What it does |
|---|---|
| Swap Dates | The two posts trade dates and nothing else moves. The one you dragged takes the target's date and time, the target takes yours |
| Reorder Schedule | The one you dragged takes the target's date and time, and everything between the two slides along by one to close the gap. Every slot you had stays filled, in order |
The same drag, both ways
Five posts running Monday to Friday, called A through E. You drag A onto Thursday.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Before | A | B | C | D | E |
| Swap Dates | D | B | C | A | E |
| Reorder Schedule | B | C | D | A | E |
Swap is a two-post trade. A and D changed places, and B, C and E never moved.
Reorder is insert and shift. A landed on Thursday, and B, C and D each slid up a day to fill the hole behind it. The running order survives and no day is left empty.
So: Swap when two posts should trade days. Reorder when you want to change the running order without opening a gap in the week.
What happens at the scheduled time
It depends on the platform, and there's no setting to hunt for either way.
Pinterest posts itself. A pin you approve goes out at its slot from our server, whether or not your Mac is awake. Nothing to switch on. That's covered under Pinterest and the Lineup.
Instagram doesn't, yet. Scheduling is ready and the calendar holds everything you've planned, but publishing waits on Meta's verification of the app. At a scheduled Instagram slot there's no notification, no automatic export, and no export folder. The app has exactly one notification in it and it fires when a couple submits their questionnaire. A scheduled Instagram post sits on the calendar and waits.
So until Meta clears us, posting to Instagram is a deliberate act in two steps. Export the posts you're ready to send, then post them from your phone. That is the next article.
No auto-publish switch exists anywhere in Settings, and nothing waits for you to turn it on. Publishing is a property of the platform connection, not a preference.
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