Carousels

A carousel is a library asset of its own, the same way an image or a video is. Studio, then Media, then the Carousels tab.

What a carousel is

Ordered slides: text slides that render through a template, and picture slides that show your own upload as-is. A carousel carries its own name, its own template and its own identity (whose name, handle and accent print on it).

The library tabs

Studio, then Media, has three page tabs. Library filters by kind: All, Images, Carousels, Videos. Designs holds pictures built in the image designer, not the layouts a carousel renders through: those live on the third tab, Templates. See Templates.

A carousel's tile shows its first rendered picture, a badge with its slide count, and, once a post uses it, "used ×N".

Preview

Click any tile to open it: an image opens large, a video opens in a player, a carousel opens as a swipeable deck, the same shape a feed shows it in. The carousel preview is built live from its current text, so it is exact even if nothing has rendered on the server yet.

Creating one

New carousel, top of the Media page. Pick one of your brand's templates to render it through. A brand with no templates of its own starts from the default template instead. Either way you land in the editor straight away, with no slides yet.

Editing

Edit, from a carousel's tile menu, opens the same editor a post's Design step uses: pick the template it renders through, pick the identity it speaks as, write the slides.

A carousel is one shared row, so editing it here changes it everywhere it's attached, on every post that carries it.

Rename sets the carousel's own name, separate from its slide text.

Attaching to a post

In the composer, the Media button's library box has a Carousels tab. Pick one and it attaches to the post.

A post publishes its own pictures, a video, or a carousel, never two: attaching a carousel clears any pictures or video already picked, and picking pictures or a video clears an attached carousel.

Once a carousel is attached, the composer's Design button opens the same editor on it. Editing from there edits the shared carousel, exactly like editing it from Media.

New post from this, on a carousel's tile menu, starts a fresh draft carrying that carousel. Nothing stops the same carousel riding on more than one post: that is what sharing a library asset is for.

Publishing

Rendering is automatic. Approving a post with a carousel attached renders every slide to a picture, and publishing renders anything that's gone stale since, for example if you edited the template after approving. There is no render step to remember.

Instagram receives the rendered pictures directly. LinkedIn receives them assembled into one PDF document, up to 300 pages, which LinkedIn shows as a swipeable deck in the feed.

If you want to see the exact final picture before you approve, the editor has a Render button. The live preview is already accurate; this just produces the real file early.

Deleting

Refused while any unpublished post (draft, awaiting approval or approved), or any pending or publishing publication, still carries it. The refusal names the post, so you know what to detach first.

Once nothing needs it, deleting a carousel deletes its rendered pictures and its slides with it. A picture slide's own upload is never touched: that is your image, not the template's render, and it stays in the library.

Rendered pictures are public

Anyone with the URL can see a rendered slide

A carousel's rendered pictures upload to a public CDN bucket, because Instagram will only accept media as a public HTTPS URL, and every platform's copy comes from that same storage. There is no per-file access control, and ids are sequential.

This is a requirement of how the platform APIs work, not a misconfiguration. Never put anything private on a slide.