How to make a seamless Instagram carousel

Instagram shows a carousel one slide at a time, but people do not read it that way. They swipe. The eye carries the last thing it saw into the next frame, and if the two line up, the post stops feeling like a gallery and starts feeling like a room you are walking through.

Everything rests on one idea: something has to cross the cut. A horizon that continues. A photo wider than a single slide. A headline that begins on one and finishes on the next. Cross the cut and the post becomes one thing. Stop at every edge and it stays ten things in a row.

1. 01Work on the whole post at once
   Not slide by slide. Lay the full width out in front of you - three slides is 3240 pixels across at the usual size - and compose on that canvas. The slide edges are guides, not walls.
2. 02Give it one ground
   A single background photo or colour spanning the entire width. This does more for cohesion than any other decision, because it is the thing every slide has in common.
3. 03Let one element straddle a seam
   A framed photo sitting half on slide two and half on slide three. A cut-out subject standing across the join. This is the move people screenshot.
4. 04Hold your type to two sizes
   One headline that carries the post, one size for everything else. Carousels fall apart when every slide has its own typographic idea.
5. 05Export at full resolution and post in order
   The seams only line up if the files do. Numbered exports exist so you cannot post slide four before slide three at two in the morning.

Editing each slide separately. Two photos cropped in isolation will never meet in the middle. A one-pixel misalignment is visible at swipe speed, because the eye is looking for exactly that edge.

Filtering slides at different strengths. A warm slide next to a neutral one puts a seam back in the post even when the geometry is perfect. Whatever you apply, apply it across the whole thing.

Exporting small. Instagram keeps up to 1440 pixels of width and re-compresses everything. Hand it 1080 and it upscales on a modern phone; hand it 1440 and the edges stay clean where the slides meet.

Portrait is the whole game: 4:5 takes more of the screen than a square, which means more of the swipe. The exact numbers, and what Instagram does to your file after you upload it, are on the size page. If you would rather see the shapes than read about them, there are eight compositions that people actually swipe to the end of.