LinkedIn carousel vs multi-image post

A carousel is one PDF that people swipe through a page at a time. A multi-image post is up to 20 photos shown together as a grid. LinkedIn removed its carousel button in June 2023, so today the PDF is the only way to post a carousel, and several photos always make a grid.

Older guides add to the confusion. LinkedIn had a real carousel button from July 2022, and in a letter to creators it said the tool would go on 26 June 2023. The carousels made with it were taken down on 14 December 2023, as Social Media Today reported. A guide that still describes that button describes something that is gone.

As a grid built around the first photo. LinkedIn's help page says two photos sit side by side, and with three or more the first photo's shape decides the layout. Nothing in the grid shows taller than 4:5, and photos in the lower row can be cropped to fit, so the edges of a slide may not show.

That crop is the catch for anything with words on it. A photo of a team survives losing a strip at its edge. A slide with a headline near the edge does not, and LinkedIn picks the crop, not you. A page in a PDF always shows whole.

To post several photos, start a post and choose the photo option, then select up to 20 images at once. In the app, the Reorder button changes their order before you post. Put the photo you want seen biggest first, since it sets the layout for the rest.

Both beat a single image. Metricool's 2026 LinkedIn study of 673,658 posts found carousels and multi-image posts ahead of single images and video on most measures. Its study page puts carousels at 17 times the interactions of images, while images are posted 6 times as often. That number needs one caveat, below.

The caveat is in how interactions are counted. Metricool's press release lists clicks and carousel swipes among the interactions it counts, and a carousel is made to be swiped. So part of the gap is the format doing what it does. The finding that holds either way is the second number: images are posted far more often, so a carousel has less company in the feed.

LinkedIn's help pages say nothing about how its feed weighs one format against the other. So choose by what the images are for, which the next section covers. For what goes on each slide, see how to make a LinkedIn carousel post.

When the images make one point in order: steps, a lesson, a story, a before and after told slide by slide. A grid shows everything at once, which suits a set of photos from an event, a team or a product. If the reader should take it one image at a time, make it a carousel.

Turning a set of images into a carousel takes one step: put them in one PDF, one image to a page and every page the same size. The free LinkedIn carousel maker does it in your browser. Drag the images into order, pick a shape and download. Your images are never uploaded, and the PDF carries no watermark.

innernote is the best tool for the words that make people open a carousel: the post above it, written the way you talk.

Either format needs a post above it, and that post is read before anyone swipes or taps. innernote writes it from a rough note in your own voice, which it learns from your past posts and a short interview. It cleans each draft so it does not read as AI, and publishes the post with your PDF or your photos attached on the days you choose.

The step by step, from a folder of images to a posted carousel, is in how to make a LinkedIn carousel from images. See how innernote works.