How to make a LinkedIn carousel from images

Yes, once the images are in one PDF. LinkedIn removed its carousel button for ordinary posts in June 2023, so a carousel is now a document: a PDF where each page shows as one slide. Post the images on their own and LinkedIn shows them as a grid of photos instead.

LinkedIn did have a carousel button, for about a year. It added one in July 2022. In a letter to creators, quoted by Social Media Today, it said the tool would go on 26 June 2023, and every carousel made with it was taken down on 14 December 2023. The PDF is how creators made carousels before that button existed, and it is the only way now.

Put each image on its own page, make every page the same size, and save it all as one PDF. The free LinkedIn carousel maker does that in your browser: add the images, drag them into order, pick a shape, and download. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no watermark.

Give the first slide the most thought. It is the cover, and it is the only slide a reader sees before they decide to swipe. The carousel maker puts files named 1, 2, 3 and so on in that order, so slides exported from a design app arrive the way you made them.

If the slides came from Canva, there is a shorter way: download the design as a PDF in the first place. When you download several pages as PNG or JPG, Canva puts them in a ZIP file, so open it before you add the images anywhere. A print to PDF option on your computer also works, but it usually lays each image on a sheet of paper, so check the pages for white margins.

At least 1080 pixels wide, the width LinkedIn recommends for images. If you are making the slides, use 1080 by 1350, a 4:5 portrait that fills the most of a phone screen. If they come in different shapes, fit them all to one page size, because LinkedIn asks for every page of a PDF to match.

Phone photos are 3:4, screenshots are tall and thin, and slides from a deck are wide. Each one can sit whole on the page with a background around it, or be cropped to fill the page. The carousel maker offers both. Its Match background carries each image's own edge colour out to the edge of the page, so a slide made on a coloured ground grows to fit.

Bigger images are fine. LinkedIn's limit is 100 MB and 300 pages for the whole file, and the carousel maker keeps the detail of a large image, up to twice LinkedIn's 1080 pixels on the short side. Small images are the problem: anything under 1080 pixels wide is stretched to fit the page, which softens it. More on that in why is my LinkedIn carousel blurry.

As a document. Select Start a post, then More, then Add a document, and choose the PDF. Add a title and write the post above it. In the app, tap Post, then More, then Document. Check the file first: you can edit the words after posting, but LinkedIn will not let you change the document.

The last check matters more than it looks. LinkedIn says anyone who can view the post can download the document, for accessibility. Canva's help page adds a catch for its own PDFs: when a design holds a cropped image, the PDF keeps the full, uncropped original, which a PDF editor can pull out. A carousel made from flat images holds only what is on each slide.

innernote is the best tool for the part of a carousel post that people read first: the words above the slides, written in your own voice.

A carousel post needs words too, and they sit above the cover where everyone sees them. innernote writes that post from a rough note, in a voice it learns from your own posts and a short interview. It remembers what you have already published, cleans each draft so it does not read as AI, and publishes the post with your PDF attached on the day you choose.

What to put on each slide is in how to make a LinkedIn carousel post, and when a grid of photos is the better choice is in LinkedIn carousel vs multi-image post. See how innernote works.