How to Create Seamless Carousels WITHOUT PHOTOSHOP

A few months ago, I ran a test to see if I could grow my Instagram account without posting any reels. The trick was creating carousel posts. Seamless carousel posts work wonderfully for photographers who want to showcase their work and for educators who want to share their expertise. If you've seen the posts that look like the design continues as you slide through, that's what we're going to make it Canva today, without further ado, let's hop in.

Just a quick reminder before we hop into the tutorial, I'm going to be demonstrating how to create this look inside of a Canva Pro account. If you would like access to 600,000 plus templates, and 100 million in Premium Stock photos, video, audio and graphics, use my link lashondabrown.com/canva to get access to a free Canva Pro 30 day trial. Now for some of you who are watching this tutorial, you're just getting started with Canva and although you like the look of a seamless carousel, you're not that used to the Design Editor and so I am going to show you a simple way to achieve this look. And then I'm going to show you the more complex way. So again, if you are a Canva beginner I don't want to overwhelm you with this. This is a very easy way to do it. And all you need to do is open up a Canva Instagram post template and it can be completely blank. Then you're going to type in the search bar at the top carousel. And that is going to sort through Canva’s template library and pull up carousel post templates. 

A carousel post in Instagram is a multi slide post. It allows you to upload multiple images and post them on the same post and to progress the images you just slide and the images continue to move. This is a great way for you to grow your Instagram account right now. Especially if you aren't into Instagram reels. So you can create these graphics in Canva, upload them to your Instagram account and share information with your followers. When you type in carousel, it's going to pull up lots of different options. And if you hover over the options, it's going to show you how many slides have been designed in that template. This one is one of six. If you scroll further down, some tend to have more inside, this one is one of eight. So as you're getting started, I would encourage you to just scroll through some of these carousel post templates and find one that fits the aesthetic that you like for your feed. Now I'm just going to pull up a random one and show you how you can achieve this look. Now this particular design actually already does it for you. And you can see if I add the first slide here, it shows part of the image on the first slide. Then if I add another page, that same image is continued and when you look at how this is set up, it will show you the easy way to do this. All you need to do is add an element to one page and have it actually go off of the design.

So when you hover, you can see that the design continues past what is visible. Then when you go to the second, you do the same thing about the opposite. What was obscured on the first one should be the only thing visible on the second one. And then what you have on the right hand side simply needs to be on the left. So if we were doing this from scratch, let's go to elements and we're just going to pull up something random, we'll search computer. And so if we drop in this element of a computer, and we drag it just like the first example, we're going to put the computer in place and we're going to obscure the image where we’re only showing one of the lines and the rest of the design is running off the screen. Then all we need to do is duplicate the page and since this was on the right hand side, we can drag it to the left hand side and show the other half of the laptop. Here we only showed one line on the left hand side and here you see the rest of the laptop. So what will happen is it will look like when you slide the computer is continuing. Now if you want to be really particular what you can do is duplicate that page, click on the image and actually use the keys on your keyboard, use the arrow keys to slide the image ever so slowly across your Canva template. And so what this will do is put it in the exact location on the graphic and simply change it horizontally. So if you want to make sure that it lines up perfectly, then that is another way to do it. And so again, what we did is we have obscured the other half of the laptop and so we will cover up to reveal the other half. That's the simple way to do it. Now for those of you who are Canva Pro power users, I'm going to show you a more advanced way to create this look. And this is the type of look that would be beneficial to a photographer who wants to show maybe multiple pictures from a wedding that they've done. So what we're going to do is take a quick pause and we're going to open up a brand new Canva design template that's going to be different dimensions. So this one is kind of ready to go, you just design your graphics and you can immediately export it. But the way that you do the advanced version of this is you actually create a long horizontal graphic in Canva and then use a completely separate website to cut it up into different sections. So let me show you how to do the more advanced option.

The first thing you'll need to do is think about how many images you want to have in your scrolling seamless carousel post. In this example, I'm going to do five but you can do whatever number you'd like. Essentially what you need to do is adjust the width based on how many of these images you want in the post. We're going to keep the height the same at 1080 and then we're going to multiply 1080 by the number of sides. So if you want it to do five, you're going to change this to 5400. And then you're going to create your template. Essentially what will happen is it's going to create a horizontal image where you can lay out everything in one Canva template. To make sure that you get that seamless effect you're going to need a little help. We're going to turn on the rulers, the guides and maybe even add a little margin if you plan on printing this, if you don't plan on printing it we can turn off the margins. And so now what we need to do is to create some guidelines that are going to show us where the image is going to get cut off. So the first one we need to click and drag it to 1080 And if it's not exact, you'll be fine. No worries. Then the next one is going to be 2160 then 3240. And the last one is 4320.

Once you've added your guidelines, you’ll want to select a background for your images. You can drag in a photo or you can select a color. So for this one, what I'm going to do is select photo and I want to use a marble background. So I'm going to type in marble and one that's not too hard to read on top of. I'm going to drag it over the full design to add that little texture to it. And now you're going to add your elements that reinforce what you're trying to communicate with your carousel post. I like to do the elements first to get that seamless look and then go back and add text. Now if you are a photographer and you're trying to showcase your images, then this is where you would drop in your images. So say for instance, if we were typing photo and then type in wedding. These are some super cute photos here. You could have the couple there. Maybe you want to do wedding rings, cute little image here. You can also crop your images, if you’d like. And so this will show the couple here but as you scroll, it will continue the image. Maybe this one you want to crop vertically, and I'm sure you've seen these on Instagram from wedding photographers where they're showing multiple images from a wedding. This is how you would lay this out in Canva. If you wanted to highlight images, if you were an educator and wanted to do text and elements, you would add in your text and then bring in your elements directly from Canva. When you're done you need to name your design. And so we're going to call this one wedding, seamless post. And just for kicks and giggles we're going to throw in a few more images so you can see the total look. And we'll add one more vertical.

Alright, so we're going to download this as a PNG and save it to our desktop. Now in order to split these up, unfortunately, you can't do that directly inside of Canva. You're going to need to leverage a third party site and you can find that tool at pinetools.com. Once you pull this up, it's going to show you a ton of free online tools. And what we need is the split image. Split image in smaller pieces, from there are going to choose your file and we're going to select that wedding seamless post and open. It's going to pull up the image then we need to split it horizontally and select the number of slides that we need, which is five. Once you have that selected, you can select png as your output and then split the image. You can download them individually or you can download the zip file. If you download the zip file, obviously you will need to unzip those before you can use them on Instagram. So if we go here, we extract and open up our file. You're going to see those five images. And so that's the advanced version of how to create that seamless carousel book.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. If this is your first time here, my name is LaShonda Brown. Be sure to subscribe to my channel for more Canva tutorials. And feel free to reach out if you'd like for me to train your team or community on how to get more out of your Canva subscription.