The best Instagram carousel size (2026)
| Shape | Size | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 3:4 portrait | 1080 × 1440 px | The tallest slide Instagram shows. Fills the most of the feed and shows whole on your profile grid. |
| 4:5 portrait | 1080 × 1350 px | The classic carousel size. Fills the feed; the grid trims its sides a little. |
| 1:1 square | 1080 × 1080 px | Works everywhere, but takes less of the screen. |
| 1.91:1 landscape | 1080 × 566 px | The widest Instagram allows. Small on phones; rarely the right choice. |
A carousel holds up to 20 slides. Every slide should have the same shape: the first one decides it for all of them.
How to check and resize your carousel
- Add your slides. Pictures (JPG, PNG, WebP) or a PDF exported from Canva, PowerPoint or Google Slides. Each PDF page becomes a slide. No file at hand? Try the sample, which has two mistakes on purpose.
- Read the checks. “Ready to post?” lists the slides of another shape, the ones under 1080 px, and the count against Instagram’s 20.
- Pick the size. 3:4, 4:5 or 1:1. Then choose what happens to slides of another shape: crop them to fill, or fit them inside on a colour or on the slide itself, blurred.
- Look at every slide, and at the post. “Every slide” shows each one as it will be; “In the post” shows the carousel on a phone, with your caption.
- Download. A ZIP with every slide at the right size, numbered in order, ready to post.
Your slides are read on your device and kept in this browser. Nothing is uploaded.
How Instagram crops a carousel
- The first slide sets the shape. If it’s 4:5, every other slide is shown 4:5, and a square or landscape slide loses its edges.
- Taller than 3:4 is cut. A 9:16 story-sized picture becomes 3:4 in a carousel, so the top and bottom go.
- The profile grid is 3:4. Your cover shows as a 3:4 tile on your profile. A 3:4 cover shows whole; a 4:5 one loses a little at the sides. In “Every slide”, the dashed frame on slide 1 shows the tile.
- Keep text away from the edges. Instagram puts the slide counter at the top right and the dots below the picture; leave a margin of about 65 px.
Why carousels look blurry, and how to fix it
- Pictures under 1080 px wide. Instagram shows slides 1080 px wide and stretches smaller ones. Export at 1080 px or more.
- A shape Instagram has to crop. Cropping zooms in, so a slightly wrong size also costs sharpness. Resize every slide to the same shape first.
- Text too small. On a phone the slide is shown about 360 points wide. Text under about 24 px on a 1080-px slide is hard to read.
- Heavy compression. Save JPGs at high quality, or PNG for slides that are mostly text.
Slides in the wrong order, or a carousel stuck at 10? See Instagram carousel problems and how to fix them.
Free, and what the app adds
The checker and resizer are free, with no account and no limit. aiCarousels goes further: it writes and designs the carousel in the right size for Instagram from the start, in your colours and fonts, and downloads it ready to post.
