Instagram carousel mockups planned as a sequence, not a pile of slides.

Instagram carousel sizes

Instagram's help center says it keeps photos at their original resolution when they are between 320 and 1080 pixels wide and have an aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 3:4, which at 1080 pixels wide means a height between 566 and 1440 pixels. Wider images are resized down to 1080 pixels, and images outside the supported ratios are cropped. For carousels, that gives four practical slide shapes.

Carousel ads follow different rules. Meta's Ads Guide lists Facebook feed carousel ads as 2 to 10 cards at 1:1, at least 1080 × 1080 pixels. If the organic carousel might become an ad, square slides avoid a second build.

One orientation for every slide

Instagram's help center is explicit: the orientation you choose (square, portrait or landscape) applies to every photo or video in the post, and you cannot choose a different one per item. Mix a 4:5 slide with a 1:1 slide and Instagram crops one of them to match. Decide the ratio before you design the first slide, and build every slide at exactly the same pixel size.

A carousel can hold up to 20 photos and videos. In the feed, people see the first item with a row of dots below it and swipe for the rest. Instagram now lets you reorder or remove items after sharing, but you cannot swap in a corrected image, so check spelling and screenshots before you post.

4:5 or 3:4: how to choose

A 3:4 slide is 90 pixels taller than a 4:5 slide at the same width, about 7% more room. That extra height is useful for a phone screenshot with a headline above it. The cost is reuse: Meta's Ads Guide lists Instagram feed ads as supporting ratios from 1.91:1 to 4:5, so a 3:4 slide would need cropping before it could run as an ad, and LinkedIn and Facebook posts are commonly planned at 4:5 or square.

In MockupX, 1080 × 1350 is the Portrait preset and 1080 × 1080 is the Square preset. For 3:4, type 1080 × 1440 into the custom size fields.

• Choose 4:5 (1080 × 1350) if the slides may be reused in ads or on other networks
• Choose 3:4 (1080 × 1440) for an Instagram-only carousel of phone screens
• Choose 1:1 (1080 × 1080) when the same slides will be posted to LinkedIn as a document

Storyboard the carousel before you design it

Write one sentence per slide before opening the editor. Each slide should advance the same story and still make sense if someone stops on it, because many people will. A short cue such as a step number helps slides that depend on the previous one.

Worked example: a scheduling app announcing calendar sharing. The cover reads “Share your calendar in three taps” over an iPhone frame showing the share sheet; slides 2 to 4 show the three steps; slide 5 shows the shared calendar on a second phone; slide 6 says where to find it in the app.

• Slide 1, cover: who it is for and what they get, plus a glimpse of the product
• Slide 2, the problem: the situation the feature fixes, in one line
• Slides 3 to 5, the workflow: one screen per step, cropped to the control that matters
• Slide 6, the result: the finished output, report or state
• Slide 7, the next step: where to try it, with no fake urgency

Make text readable at phone width

A 1080-pixel slide is shown on a phone at roughly 390 points wide, so everything shrinks by a factor of about 2.8. Text set at 40 px on the canvas appears around 14 points on screen, which is about the smallest comfortable reading size. Interface text inside a screenshot is usually much smaller than that, which is why full-screen captures of desktop apps rarely read in a carousel.

• Headlines: 70 px or larger on a 1080-wide slide
• Supporting text: 40 px or larger, two lines at most
• Screenshots: crop to the region that proves the point, then scale it up
• Contrast: dark text on a light background or the reverse, never mid-tone on mid-tone

Seams, panoramas and continuous backgrounds

Some carousels run one image across several slides so that a shape or line continues when you swipe. It looks good, but Instagram shows each slide on its own, so anything split across a seam is cut in half in the feed and in shares. Keep text, faces and screenshots fully inside one slide and let only background shapes cross the edge.

MockupX exports one image per design and does not slice a wide canvas into slides. For continuity, use the same background preset on every slide and keep the device at the same size and position, which gives the set a continuous feel without splitting content.

Building the slides in MockupX

Set the slide size once, choose a background and layout, and keep them fixed for the whole carousel. For each slide, swap the screenshot and edit the headline and description, then export. Because every export uses the same canvas, all slides come out at the identical pixel size Instagram expects.

• Templates with portrait or square output: iPhone Spotlight (1080 × 1350), Square Device and Social Screenshot (1080 × 1080)
• Layouts with one, two or three screens for comparison slides
• Frameless screenshot style with padding, shadow and corner radius for cropped UI
• Name exports in order, such as 01-cover.png, 02-problem.png, so they upload in sequence

Common carousel mistakes

These show up most often when slides are built one at a time without a plan.

• A cover that names the feature but not the benefit
• Slides at slightly different sizes, so Instagram crops some of them
• The same full-window screenshot on every slide with a different headline
• Text split across two slides that only reads when both are seen side by side
• A last slide that only says “follow for more”