Cut one wide image into carousel slides

Slide 1 is the left edge, and it is the only slide most people see

A carousel is one post that plays left to right, so the order is the plain one: slide 01 is the left edge of your original image and the first thing anybody sees. That is the opposite of a profile grid, where the tiles are separate posts and the order reverses — if you have used our grid maker, do not carry its habit over here.

The consequence that matters for a panorama: slide 1 does all the work. It is what appears in the feed, and the great majority of people never swipe. A panorama whose subject sits in the middle is a panorama whose subject is invisible to most of its audience. Put something that stands alone on the first slide, and let the sweep be the reward for swiping rather than the whole idea.

The sizes, and why these four

Every slide in a carousel has to be the same shape — mixing them makes the network crop to whichever it picked first, and your seams stop lining up. So the shape is chosen once, for the whole set:

• Portrait 4:5 — 1080×1350. The default, and the tallest shape a normal feed image is shown at without being cut down. Most vertical screen space per slide, which is most of the reason to use a carousel at all.
• Square 1:1 — 1080×1080. The safest across networks and the easiest to reason about: an n-slide square carousel is an image n times as wide as it is tall.
• Full portrait 9:16 — 1080×1920. Full-screen vertical. Very tall, very narrow per slide — a panorama across several of these needs a source image that is extremely wide.
• Landscape 1.91:1 — 1080×566. The classic link-preview landscape shape, for feeds and formats that letterbox anything taller.

The tool builds one full-resolution canvas of the entire strip — slides × slide width — then cuts it at exact boundaries, so adjacent slides join with no drift and no half-pixel seam. Your image is centre-cropped to the strip's aspect ratio and never stretched.

Choosing a source image

The one thing to get right is the aspect ratio of what you start with. Three slides at 4:5 is a strip of 3240×1350 — that is 2.4:1, wider than a normal photo. Ten slides at 4:5 is 10800×1350, or 8:1, which almost nothing you shoot casually will fill. If the source is not that wide, the centre crop takes the top and bottom off, which on a photograph usually means it takes the sky and the ground.

Practical rule: work out the strip's ratio (slides × width, by height) and export your source at least that wide before you load it. The line under the preview always shows the source dimensions and what the slides came out at, so a bad crop is visible before you download anything.

Resolution is worth thinking about too. Ten slides at 1080 px each is a 10,800-pixel-wide working canvas; the tool steps the export down if the browser cannot hold it, and says so, rather than silently returning blank images — which is what a canvas past its limit actually does in Safari.

What this tool does not do

It does not post anything, and there is nothing to connect. It does not add slide numbers, arrows or “swipe” prompts onto the images — that is a design decision, not a cropping one. It does not split video, and it does not build a LinkedIn document post, which is a PDF rather than an image carousel. It generates nothing: you bring the image.

And it keeps nothing. Reload the page and your file is gone, because no copy of it ever existed outside the tab.

Where the slides go next

Carousels work on any network that takes a multi-image post. The caption you attach is where the per-network rules bite — 2,200 characters on Instagram, 3,000 on LinkedIn, 280 on X — and you can check one caption against all of them at once with the caption length checker. Each channel's full rules, including which visibility states actually exist and what media is required, are on the social media scheduler pages.

If what you actually need is the artwork rather than the knife, Hermoso generates finished on-brand creative — including carousel ad formats where the type is rendered natively rather than drawn by a model, so it never garbles. The AI image ad generator is the place to start.

Frequently asked questions

What order do carousel slides go in?

Straight reading order: slide 01 is the left edge of your original image and the first slide people see. A carousel is a single post played left to right, so unlike a profile grid — which is many separate posts and therefore reverses — nothing is flipped. The archive contains a SLIDE-ORDER.txt restating that, because the two tools have opposite rules and it is an easy habit to carry over.

What size should carousel slides be?

All the same shape, which is the rule that actually matters: mixing shapes makes the network crop everything to whichever it saw first and your seams stop meeting. This tool offers 1080×1350 (4:5 portrait, the default and the tallest a normal feed image is shown at), 1080×1080 (square), 1080×1920 (full vertical) and 1080×566 (1.91:1 landscape), and applies the one you pick to every slide.

How wide does my source image need to be?

At least as wide, proportionally, as the finished strip. Three slides at 4:5 is a 3240×1350 strip — roughly 2.4:1 — and ten slides at 4:5 is 8:1, which almost no ordinary photo will fill. Anything narrower gets centre-cropped, which on a photograph usually means losing the sky and the ground. The line under the preview shows your source dimensions and the resulting slide size, so you can see the problem before downloading.

Is my image uploaded anywhere?

No. The browser reads it locally, draws it into a canvas on your machine, cuts it and hands the slides back as a download. There is no upload and no network request in that path — the tool still works if you disconnect from the internet once the page has loaded.

How many slides should a panorama carousel use?

Fewer than people expect. Slide 1 is what appears in the feed and most of the audience never swipes at all, so a panorama whose subject sits in the middle is a panorama most people never see. Two to four slides keeps the payoff close; ten means nine slides that only the most patient viewer reaches, and a source image eight times wider than it is tall.

Does it work for LinkedIn carousels?

It produces image slides, which suit any network that accepts a multi-image post. LinkedIn's native document post — the thing people usually mean by a LinkedIn carousel — is a PDF rather than a set of images, so these slides are not a drop-in for that format. Check the caption against LinkedIn's 3,000-character cap with the caption length checker either way.