How to Make a LinkedIn Carousel in 2026 (It Is a PDF, Not a Set of Images)

Almost everyone gets this wrong on the first attempt, and it is LinkedIn's fault for naming things badly. A LinkedIn carousel is not an image carousel like Instagram's. It is a document post: you upload a single multi-page PDF, and LinkedIn renders the pages as swipeable slides.

Upload eight PNGs and you get eight separate images in a gallery, which is a different and much worse-performing format. Upload one eight-page PDF and you get the carousel you were trying to make.

What size is a LinkedIn carousel?

LinkedIn renders document posts at the aspect ratio of the PDF pages themselves, so the ratio you build at is the ratio people see.

• 4:5 portrait, 1080 × 1350 px. The best-performing choice. It takes maximum vertical space in the feed, which matters more on LinkedIn than anywhere else because the feed is dense.
• 1:1 square, 1080 × 1080 px. Fine, and convenient if the same deck is going to Instagram as images too.
• 16:9 landscape, 1920 × 1080 px. Only if you are genuinely repurposing a presentation. It reads small on mobile, where most of your audience is.

Practical limits: LinkedIn accepts up to 300 pages and 100 MB, but keep it to 8 to 12 pages. Completion rate is what the algorithm rewards, and nobody finishes a 30-page document post.

How to post it

On desktop, start a post, click the document icon (it may sit behind “Add a document” in the overflow menu), upload the PDF, and give it a title. That title appears under the carousel in the feed and is genuinely load-bearing, so treat it as a headline rather than a filename.

Document posts cannot be created from the mobile app on most accounts. Post from desktop, or schedule through a tool that supports document posts.

Getting from design to a single PDF

This is the step that turns a ten-minute job into an hour. Whatever you designed in has to end up as one PDF with correctly-sized pages, in order.

• Canva. Export as PDF Standard. Set the document size to 1080 × 1350 before you start, not after.
• Figma. Select the frames in order and export as PDF. Figma respects frame order, so name and arrange frames deliberately.
• Google Slides or PowerPoint. Set a custom slide size first (Google Slides accepts inches: 7.5 × 9.375 in is 4:5), then download as PDF. Skipping this leaves you with a 16:9 deck that reads tiny in the feed.
• AI design tools. Claude Design and similar tools export standalone HTML rather than a PDF, so there is a conversion step in between.

For that last case, the manual route is to render each slide to an image at 1080 × 1350 with the interactive carousel UI hidden, then combine the images into a single PDF in the right order. It works, and it is tedious enough that people stop making carousels. Renda collapses it into one step: drop the HTML export, pick LinkedIn carousel, and get back a finished multi-page PDF at 1080 × 1350, ready to upload. Five renders a month are free and no account is required.

The Claude Design LinkedIn carousel guide goes deeper on that specific path, and the social pack guide covers producing the LinkedIn PDF and the Instagram PNGs from one design in a single pass.

What performs on LinkedIn specifically

LinkedIn is not Instagram, and carousels that do well here look different.

• Lead with the claim, not the brand. Page one should state a specific, arguable point. Logo-first cover pages get scrolled past.
• Text can be denser than on Instagram. The audience is reading rather than browsing. A full sentence per page is fine.
• Fonts must be embedded. PDF export from most tools embeds fonts by default, but exports that go through an image step are safe by definition, which is one quiet advantage of rendering to images first.
• Page one is the thumbnail. It has to work at small size in a crowded feed.
• Put the ask in the post text, not just the last page. Many people never swipe to the end.

Quick answers

• Can I upload images instead of a PDF? You can, but you will get a multi-image post, not a swipeable carousel. Only PDFs become document posts.
• Can I post a carousel from my phone? Generally no. Document posts are desktop-only on most accounts.
• Do links inside the PDF work? No. LinkedIn renders pages as flat images, so hyperlinks are not clickable. Put the URL in the post text.
• Can I edit it after posting? No. Replacing the document means deleting and reposting, which resets engagement. Proofread first.

The format itself is the whole trick. Build at 4:5, keep it under a dozen pages, export as one PDF, and post from desktop. Everything else is ordinary content work.