How to build a carousel
Pick your frames, arrange them on a continuous canvas, and export a set ready to post.
Updated Jul 26, 20264 min readApplies to 1.0.0
Carousel Studio is where a set of frames becomes a multi-image Instagram post. You send frames to it from The Archive, arrange them, and export.
Send frames from The Archive
Select the frames you want, then choose Send to Carousel Studio. Order of selection is the order they land in.
Work in Canvas or Slides
Canvas is one continuous surface that gets sliced into slides, and it is what opens by default. Slides steps through them one at a time. Switch between the two whenever you like, they are two views of the same thing.
Set how each photo fills its frame
Select a photo and the tools appear on it. Fit shows the whole frame. Fill crops to fill and will cut the sides of a landscape image. Width 2x stretches one photo across two slides, which is the move that makes a carousel feel designed rather than assembled.
Crop sliders snap to centre, and dragging a photo snaps to alignment guides against the others.
Add brand assets if you want them
The assets panel has four groups: Frames and Borders, Film and Analog, Logos and Watermarks, and Backgrounds and Textures. They come from your brand kit in Settings, so whatever you set up there is what you see here.
Export or schedule
⌘ E exports the slides as PNGs. There is a PDF export too, for sending a set to someone rather than posting it. Or use the schedule sheet to put it into the posting queue.
Starting one on your phone
If you have the iPhone app, you can pick frames and rough out a carousel there. Those drafts show up in Carousel Studio under From your phone, and tapping one opens it as a full editable project.
It goes one way, phone to Mac. Anything you do on the Mac stays on the Mac.
What we do not do yet
Export is PNG and PDF, not JPEG. There is no layout gallery. And the caption is written in The Archive on the individual frames, not here.
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