Split a picture into an Instagram carouselOne wide photo, swipeable slides.

A carousel is one picture with swipes in it

A panorama carousel works because each slide ends where the next begins: swipe, and the picture continues. That only happens when every slide is the same shape and the boundaries fall on exact pixel columns. Instagram fixes the shape of the whole post from its first item, so a set of slides cut at different ratios gets cropped on the way in, and the seams stop meeting. This board cuts every slide from one shared plan at one ratio.

Slides share the picture’s height, so the number of slides decides how much of the height survives. Three 4:5 slides want a picture 2.4 times as wide as it is tall; ten slides want eight times. If your panorama is not that shape, the framing step makes the decision explicit — crop and choose what goes, or pad and keep everything — and prints the pixel cost.

A worked example

Keeping the seams kind

• Keep faces and text away from the boundaries; a swipe always splits whatever sits on one.
• An odd number of slides puts a whole slide, not a seam, in the middle of the picture.
• Fine repeating detail along a seam shows the re-encode most; a sky or a wall hides it.
• Post at 1080 pixels wide per slide or more; smaller slides are scaled up by the platform.

Carousel limits and shapes are platform behaviour, checked in October 2026. If the platform changes them, the slides are still exact; only the advice about them would need updating.

How to do it here

1. Open the picture. A panorama or any wide picture; it is decoded in this tab.
2. Set the slide count and shape. Choose 2 to 20 slides and 4:5, 1:1 or 3:4 in the Social rail.
3. Frame it. Crop to fit and drag which part is kept, or pad to fit to keep every pixel.
4. Cut and post in order. Cut to a ZIP; add the slides to the post in file-number order, 1 first.

Questions that come up