A carousel is a stack of slides that Instagram shows one after another. The strip along the bottom of the editor is where you manage them.
The strip
Each tile is a slide, in the order they'll be posted. Click one to edit it. The badge on a tile is either a number or a label:
- Cover — the first slide, the one that has to stop the scroll.
- CTA — the last slide, the one that asks for something.
Those labels come from the template's design. They don't behave differently — you can move, duplicate or delete them like any other slide — and every slide you add yourself is an ordinary content slide. The numbering on the other tiles skips Cover and CTA, so slide "2" is the second slide of the middle.
Adding, duplicating, deleting, reordering
- Add — the dashed + tile at the end adds an empty slide.
- Duplicate — copies the slide you're on, with everything on it. This is how you add
a slide that matches the rest: duplicate a middle slide and change the words, rather than starting from an empty one and rebuilding the layout.
- Delete — the small bin on the current slide's tile. It's only offered when there's
more than one slide, and it doesn't ask twice, so Ctrl Z is your friend.
- Reorder — drag a tile along the strip.
Fewer, better slides beat more of them. If a carousel is running past seven or eight and still going, it's usually two posts rather than one long one.
Applying something to every slide
Three buttons say Apply to all slides, and they copy different things. Knowing which is which saves a lot of undoing:
| Where you find it | What it copies |
|---|---|
| On a photo layer's Overlay section | The overlay's color and opacity — but only onto photo layers on other slides that already have an overlay. It won't add one where there isn't one. |
| On the slide background's Overlay section | The overlay onto every other slide that has a background photo, whether or not it already had one. |
| On the slide background itself | The whole background: the photo, its crop, its adjustments and flips, and its overlay. |
The last one is how you get a consistent look across a carousel in one press: set up slide one's background exactly right, then push it everywhere.
Changing several slides at once
The Brand Kit and AI Rewrite tabs work across slides rather than one at a time. Both have an Apply to row at the top:
- This slide — just the one you're on.
- All slides — the whole carousel.
- Choose — thumbnails to tick, for when it's some but not all.
So applying your colors to a five-slide carousel is one tap, and rewriting the copy across all five is another.
Exporting a carousel
Export offers the current slide or all slides. All slides gives you numbered files to upload to Instagram in order. That's covered in Exporting.
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