How to Make a Carousel on Instagram (Step by Step, Without the Guesswork)
To make a carousel on Instagram, tap the + button, choose Post, then tap the stacked-squares icon above your camera roll and select up to 20 photos or videos in the order you want them seen. Caption, share, done. One warning before you start: your first photo locks the crop for every slide behind it, so choose that one before anything else.
It's Sunday evening. You've got fourteen photos from the weekend, or eight slides of advice you've been meaning to post for two weeks, and you're staring at the + button trying to remember which icon turns one post into many.
By the end of this you'll know the exact steps to publish a carousel, the real slide limit (and why your app might show you a different one), the size that keeps slides from getting cropped, and the ordering trick that decides whether anyone reaches your last slide.
Most carousels go wrong earlier than you'd guess. Not in the design or the caption, but in the first five seconds, at the moment you tap the first photo. That photo quietly sets the aspect ratio for all nineteen behind it. Pick a square one, and your carefully framed portrait shots spend the rest of the post living inside a crop they were never meant for.
How Do You Make a Carousel on Instagram? (The Exact Steps)
The whole thing takes about a minute once you know where the multi-select button hides:
Tap the + button and choose Post.
Above your camera roll, tap the icon that looks like two stacked squares. That's multi-select.
Tap your photos and videos in the order you want them to appear. The number on each thumbnail shows its position.
Tap Next. You can apply filters to all slides at once or edit each one on its own.
Write your caption, tag people, add a location if you want one, and share.
That's the mechanical part. Nobody fails at the mechanical part. What separates a carousel that gets finished from one that gets abandoned happens in steps 1 and 3, which is what the rest of this covers.
How Many Photos Can an Instagram Carousel Hold?
Twenty. Instagram doubled the limit from 10 starting in 2024, and any mix of photos and videos counts toward it. Each video slide can run up to 60 seconds.
The rollout was never fully uniform, though. Some older accounts still see 10, and plenty of third-party scheduling tools still cap uploads at 10 because their integrations were built for the old limit. So if you're stuck at 10, the fix is usually boring: update the app, or post natively instead of through your scheduler.
The more interesting question is whether you should ever use all 20. Hold that thought. The answer is mostly no, and the reason involves some math Instagram doesn't advertise.
What Size Should Your Carousel Slides Be?
1080 × 1350 pixels, which is the 4:5 portrait ratio. It's Instagram's own labeled preset in the uploader, and it fills roughly 20% more of the screen than a square post (that figure comes from design-tool measurements, so treat it as approximate, but the difference is obvious the moment you compare the two in a feed).
Two sizing details that most guides skip:
The first slide is a commitment. Whatever ratio it has, Instagram applies to the whole set. Mixed orientations get letterboxed with borders rather than shown at their natural size, which usually reads as an accident rather than a choice.
Your profile grid disagrees with your feed. The grid previews posts at 3:4, so a 4:5 slide loses a strip off the top and bottom there. If your hook text sits near the edge of slide one, it gets decapitated on your own profile. Keep faces and text near the center of the frame. Instagram added a native 3:4 option (1080 × 1440) in 2026 partly for this reason, but 4:5 is still the default and the safer choice for most carousels.
What Makes People Swipe Past Slide One?
A reason to. That sounds glib, so here's the actual mechanism: Instagram tracks how far viewers swipe, and carousels get a second life no other format gets. If someone scrolls past your post without engaging, Instagram can re-serve it to them later, starting from slide two. Your carousel gets two chances in the same person's feed, with two different opening slides.
Which changes how you should think about slide two. For part of your audience, slide two is the hook. If slide one says "I grew my newsletter to 5,000 subscribers in six months" and slide two just says "...and here's how," the re-serve shows those people a slide that means nothing on its own.
The habit worth building: make every slide legible to someone who never saw the previous one. One idea per slide, stated fully. It feels repetitive while you're making it. It won't feel repetitive to someone reading at 11pm on a phone, which is where your audience actually is.
Should You Use All 20 Slides? (The Advice Everyone Gets Backwards)
The common advice since the limit doubled: more slides means more swipes means more engagement, so go long. That advice is incomplete in a way that costs you reach.
What the algorithm appears to reward is swipe-through rate, meaning the share of viewers who reach your final slide, not the raw swipe count. A 20-slide carousel that most people abandon at slide 8 sends a worse signal than an 8-slide carousel that 70% of viewers finish. You built more and earned less.
Length has to be justified per slide, not per topic. For most educational or tips-style carousels, somewhere between 3 and 8 slides is where completion rates hold up; the full 20 makes sense for photo dumps and visual stories, where nobody expects to reach the end anyway. These ranges come from creator-tool studies rather than Instagram itself, so treat them as directional. The swipe-through logic, though, is just arithmetic.
Where Does the Time Actually Go?
If your carousel is photos, you're basically done: pick, order, post. If it's a text-and-graphics carousel, the kind with tips or a story or a breakdown, the time goes somewhere else entirely. It goes into making slide 6 look like it belongs to the same family as slide 2. Same margins, same font sizes, a headline that doesn't wrap onto a third line. You can lose an evening to this in Canva and end up with eight slides that look loosely related at best.
If that's the stage where your carousels stall, where the ideas are ready but the layout eats the whole evening, that's the specific gap ReSlide closes. You hand it the content, it keeps every slide consistent and exports at 1080 × 1350, and the evening goes back to being yours.
FAQ
How many pictures can you put in one Instagram post?
Up to 20 photos or videos in a single carousel. If your app still stops at 10, update it. If you post through a scheduling tool, check whether the tool itself is enforcing the old limit.
Can you mix photos and videos in an Instagram carousel?
Yes, in any combination, as long as the total stays at 20 or under. Each video slide can be up to 60 seconds, and videos autoplay as viewers swipe to them.
Can you edit a carousel after posting it?
Partially. You can delete individual slides from a published carousel, and slide reordering has been rolling out through 2026, so you may or may not have it yet. What you can't do is add a new slide. That still means deleting and reposting, which resets your engagement.
What's the best size for Instagram carousel slides?
1080 × 1350 pixels (4:5 portrait) for every slide. It's Instagram's default preset and takes up the most feed space without pushing your caption off-screen.
Why can't I add 20 photos to my carousel?
Either your app needs updating, your account hasn't received the expanded limit yet (the rollout has never been fully uniform), or you're posting through a third-party tool that still caps carousels at 10.
✅ Your Next Step
Choose your next carousel's first slide before you make anything else. Crop it to 4:5, put the hook in the middle third of the frame, and build every other slide to match it, not the other way around. Or just use ReSlide, which will have everything covered for you with 10 free generations.