How to Make an Instagram Carousel in 2026: Sizes, Tools and the Export Step Everyone Gets Wrong

A carousel is the highest-effort post format on Instagram and, consistently, the highest-performing one. It gets two chances in the feed (Instagram re-serves carousels to people who didn't swipe), it holds attention longer than a single image, and it gives you room to actually say something.

Most guides stop at “pick a template.” The part that actually costs people hours is the last mile: getting finished slides out of a design tool as clean, correctly-sized image files. This guide covers the whole job, from dimensions to the export step.

What size is an Instagram carousel?

Instagram supports three carousel ratios. Pick one and use it for every slide in the set, because mixing ratios inside a single carousel causes Instagram to crop to the first slide's aspect ratio.

• 4:5 portrait, 1080 × 1350 px. The default choice. It takes the most vertical space in the feed, which means more of the screen is yours as someone scrolls.
• 1:1 square, 1080 × 1080 px. Safe and predictable. Use it when the same asset needs to work on other platforms too.
• 1.91:1 landscape, 1080 × 566 px. Rarely worth it. It occupies the least feed space and reads as an afterthought.

Render at 2x scale (so 2160 × 2700 for a 4:5 slide) and let Instagram downsample. Uploading at exactly 1080 wide means Instagram's compression has nothing to work with and text edges go soft. Export as PNG, not JPEG, and never run a PNG through a JPEG compressor before uploading.

Keep important content inside a safe margin of roughly 60 px on every edge. Instagram overlays the carousel dot indicator near the bottom and the profile chrome near the top.

How many slides should a carousel have?

Instagram allows up to 20. Six to eight is where engagement holds. The rule that matters more than the count: every slide has to earn the swipe to the next one. If a slide is decoration, it is costing you completions.

A structure that reliably works:

• Slide 1: the hook. One claim, one number, or one tension.
• Slide 2: the stakes. Why this matters to the reader now.
• Slides 3 to 6: one idea per slide, each with a short headline.
• Slide 7: the summary or the counterintuitive takeaway.
• Slide 8: the ask. One action, stated plainly.

Write the hook last. It is easier to write a promise once you know what the carousel actually delivers.

The four ways to actually build one

There is no single best tool, only trade-offs between speed, control and how templated the result looks.

• Canva. Fastest path if you are starting from nothing and happy inside a template. Exports directly to PNG at the right sizes. The cost is that a lot of Instagram already looks like Canva, so distinctiveness takes real work.
• Figma. Total control, proper design systems, and clean multi-frame export. It is the right answer if you or someone on your team is a designer, and the wrong answer if not.
• AI design tools. Claude Design and similar tools let you describe the carousel in plain English and get a designed, multi-slide result back in minutes. The output is markedly less templated than Canva. The catch is the export format, covered below.
• Templates plus a spreadsheet. If you ship carousels weekly, build one strong template and vary only the copy. Boring, and by far the most sustainable option at volume.

The export step everyone gets wrong

Here is where the hours go. Instagram needs one image file per slide, at exact dimensions, in order. Design tools do not all give you that.

Canva and Figma handle it natively. AI design tools frequently do not. Claude Design, for instance, exports standalone HTML rather than images, and the obvious workarounds all fail in specific ways: a browser screenshot captures at viewport resolution and picks up the interactive carousel UI (arrows, page counters, dots) along with your design; print-to-PDF crops unpredictably; a direct image export tends to produce the entire carousel as one tall image, which Instagram will not accept as a carousel.

The fix is to render the HTML at exact platform dimensions with the interactive chrome hidden, producing one PNG per slide in deck order. You can script this yourself with Puppeteer or headless Chrome if you are comfortable writing a small script per design. Renda does the same job without the script: drop the HTML export in, pick Instagram 4:5, and get back a ZIP of clean 1080 × 1350 PNGs, numbered in order. The first five renders each month are free.

If you are working specifically in Claude Design, the Claude Design carousel workflow covers the prompting side in detail, and the size guide lists the exact dimensions for every platform.

Before you post

• File names in slide order (slide-01.png, slide-02.png). Upload order follows file order on most schedulers.
• Every slide the same ratio. Instagram crops the set to slide one's.
• Text inside the 60 px safe margin on all edges.
• Cover slide readable at thumbnail size. If the hook is unreadable at 120 px wide, it is too long.
• First line of the caption repeats the hook. Not everyone swipes, and the caption is your second shot.

The mistakes that cost the most

• Screenshotting the slides. The single most common reason a carousel looks amateur. Screenshots capture browser or app chrome and downsample your type.
• Too many slides. Past ten, completion rate falls faster than reach rises.
• Drifting type hierarchy. If slide 1's headline is 60pt, every headline is 60pt. AI tools in particular will drift between slides, so check before export.
• No ask. The final slide is doing real work. One action, stated in one verb.

Design is the part people focus on. Sizing and export is the part that quietly decides whether the finished post looks professional. Get the dimensions right, render at 2x, keep one file per slide in order, and the carousel you designed is the carousel that ships.