- This video is sponsored by Skillshare.
Almost exactly two years ago, I made a tutorial video
on how to split pictures for Instagram.
Fast forward to now,
about 700,000 people have watched that video
and I keep getting requests to make a follow-up,
specifically how to do
a seamless Instagram carousel collage.
The difference between the two being that in the first one,
it was just a single photo
that you were chopping in the middle,
in the collage version,
you're mashing up a whole bunch of photos
to make them one big, long, seamless swiping experience.
Now, the cool thing about this is that it's not just a bunch
of photos back to back.
All of these photos will flow into one another
and some of them might be on the split line
and some of them might be foreground
and some might be background.
You can do some really cool creative things with this.
Now, a quick disclaimer, this tutorial will include math.
If you don't like math, I'll try and break it down
as simple as I can for ya, but you're gonna need to use it
at some point.
Okay, but why would you want to do this type of post?
What's the advantage?
First of all, this is a cool way to tell a story.
By doing a post like this, you can tell a story
from start to end, rather than trying to get it all
into one frame.
Next, it's because it's good for the Instagram algorithm.
When you make carousel posts like this
with multiple photos in them, Instagram will show them
to your followers more than once.
Let's say they see the first photo but they go by it,
later on in the day,
Instagram will show them the second photo,
and maybe the third one, and then there's also engagement.
Creating a post where people have to swipe
to see the whole thing actually creates engagement
with your audience.
The longer you can keep them held on your post, the better.
We've all seen a lot of different carousel posts
on Instagram, and usually they're just a collection
of photos back to back, but doing it this way
will definitely make you stand out
amongst all the other millions of users
that are on Instagram.
Is it billions at this point?
So with all that said, I'm really excited to teach you
how to do a seamless Instagram carousel collage,
but there's a twist.
I've never actually done this before.
I've got a pretty good idea in my head
of how this is gonna work,
but I've never actually tried it in practice,
so we're gonna be working through it
for the first time together,
and you're gonna get to see any of the little problems
worked out as I go.
All right, so the way that I'm planning on doing this
is using Adobe Photoshop,
but if you apply the same principles,
it should pretty much work on any photo editor
that you might use.
So I've got these eight photos from a trip to Canmore
back in the day.
They're all pre-edited, so I've got basically all the photos
that I'm gonna want for this carousel collage.
Some of them are in portrait, some of them are in landscape,
so we're gonna do some cool things with how we arrange them.
Okay, so when we open Photoshop and we click Create New,
we're gonna get this dialog box,
where now we have to choose the size of the canvas
that we want to work on.
This is where the math comes in.
The most real estate that you can take up
in the Instagram app is by using a five tall
by four wide ratio for your photo,
but when we start to want to make it wider,
basically for every time that we want to swipe,
we're gonna add four to the width,
so instead of five by four,
two photos would be five by eight,
three photos would be five by 12,
four photos would be five by 16, so on and so forth.
I think with these eight photos, what I wanna do is try
and make them fit within five slides,
so now we've got to do some math here.
So the maximum height that you can do on Instagram is 1350,
and then the width, each photo is gonna be 1080 wide,
1080 times five, 5400
by 1350, and 1350 will always be the height,
but the width is what'll change.
So we're gonna Create, and that is our canvas.
I'm gonna pull in all of my photos,
and now what we want to do is basically
just make one big, pretty picture.
So while I take my time, arranging this into something
that I think looks kind of cool,
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Okay, back to this swipey-swipey.
Okay, so one thing that I'm running into
is trying to organize these all,
and thinking about where the splits are going to be,
'cause I don't necessarily want to have like a small sliver
of the next picture in one split.
I want to at least get enough to entice you to swipe
to the next one.
So one thing that you can do is you can add grids
by hitting command or control if you're on a PC
and apostrophe, and then what we can do is go
into Photoshop, Preferences, Guides, Grid & Slices,
and in this specific case,
we want to have five different subdivisions,
like we said we want to have five different slices,
and so now you can see, just very faintly here,
we've got these grids,
so you can see where your slices are going to be.
So the first slice I have set up so it's right in between
these first two photos, but we've got this smaller photo
on top of it, so you'll have that enticing,
wanting you to swipe to the next one.
Similar with the next bit, so between the two edges
of these two photos, but we've got that one photo on top
that'll entice you to see the rest of it.
Then with this one, we actually are going
to see a good chunk of the mountain here,
and you're going to have to swipe to get to the rest,
and this is the one that I'm not really sure of.
I didn't want to make it just all plain five in a row.
I wanted to do something a little bit different with it,
so I made these two in the middle here slimmer,
and then I wanted to do one nice wide one
that actually got cut, but now that I can see
where my slices are, I don't want to slice right on me,
so maybe something like that.
Yeah, I think that looks pretty good.
So what we want to do next, and this is what I was teaching
in my old tutorial, is we want to slice these up.
So in your tool bar, wherever your toolbar might be,
you can go down to your Crop Tool,
and if you hold down on it, there's a Slice Tool,
and then what we're going to do is, from the top left here,
I'm going to make my first slice,
and you can overshoot the boundary
of your actual canvas itself,
and then knowing that each photo
is going to be 1080 pixels wide, we want to just make sure
that this lands on that 1080 and it should snap to the grid
if you've got Grid Snapping on,
and if you want to find that, click on your Help,
and just go Snap, Snap To Grid, and then you can make sure
that that's turned on,
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and then we're going to add another slice here.
It's looking good.
There might actually be an easier way to make these slices.
Let me know if you know what it is.
This is just the way that I've always done it.
So now I've got five slices here.
So you can see in the top corners here, one, two, three,
four and five.
So what we're going to do now is we're going to go up
to File, Export, Save for Web.
This is important.
You have to use Save for Web (Legacy),
and what we're going to do is zoom out here
so we can see the whole thing.
I'm going to choose JPEG, Maximum Quality at 100.
My image size is 5400 by 1350.
We're going to hit Save.
I'm going to navigate to where I want to save it,
call it Canmore Collage, and then down here,
I want to do Images Only, All Slices.
We're going to hit save, and now, If we go find that,
you'll see it'll have made a folder called Images,
and we've got our five images here,
and you can either AirDrop it or put it in your Google Drive
or however you get files over to your phone,
and then when we go into the Instagram app,
you're going to want to make sure
that you select the first photo,
and then you hit the little Expand button
in the bottom left hand corner,
so that it pulls up the full size of it,
then after you've done that, hit the Multi Post
or Carousel button, which is in the bottom right corner
of the photo, and then you can select in order
which ones you want.
When you hit next, you'll be able to see
a little preview of it.
Now, there are going to be the little black bars in between,
but they'll be gone when you actually post it.
So it's looking good.
We hit Next.
Write your caption.
Okay, let's hit Share, and then we can take a look
and we've got our perfect,
seamless Instagram carousel collage.
Pretty good for a first try, hey?
So that is how you create
a seamless Instagram carousel collage.
Hopefully that was helpful for you, and if I missed anything
or if you have any questions,
make sure to leave a comment down below,
and on your way down there hit the like
and subscribe button, hit that bell notification,
so you don't miss out on future reviews and tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
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