Instagram has been adding a couple of new features lately, all designed to help you share more images.
Back in August 2016, they added Stories, designed to be a temporary slideshow of the day’s moments.
Now they’ve added a new feature that lets you share up to 10 photos as once as a gallery in a single post. It’s often known as the carousel post feature.
Multiple Photos, One Post
A group of photos shared this way is considered one post. That has a few important effects.
Firstly, it will be represented as a single thumbnail on your profile and feed.
Secondly, any filters you apply or captions you write will apply to all the photos in the series. So you can’t change the filter or caption from photo. An exception is with tagging people in the photo–you can do that for each photo individually.
Thirdly, if you decide to delete the post, it deletes all the photos in it.
How to Do It
There’s no real trick to using the feature–you simply have to hit one more button as part of the upload process. There’s a new “Select Multiple” button that’s part of the normal upload screen. Just tap that:
You’ll then get the option to select up to 10 photos:
Each image you add will be indicated in the top right corner of its thumbnail. Tap and hold to change the order.
Once you’ve selected them, it moves on to the filter. It’s important to note that whatever filter you choose is applied to all of the photos in the sequence–you can’t set it individually.
The same holds true with captions–the same one applies to every image in the sequence. (You can, however, tag people in individual photos.)
How it Looks
When it first launched, Instagram’s gallery feature only worked with square images. In August 2017, they added the ability to display rectangular images in both landscape and portrait orientations.
There are only very subtle visual differences to indicate that it’s a multi-part post rather than a single-image post. The display sizes are the same as regular single posts.
On a desktop through a web browser, the thumbnail still displays in a square that’s 293 by 293 pixels.
And the enlarge image shows in a box that’s 600 by 600 pixels (stretched, and not retina).
Through a browser, you get new left and right arrows when you hover over the image, and there’s a small navigation indicator just under the image.
On the phone app, it’s even more subtle. There’s the small navigation bar under the image, and you can swipe left to right to move through the slideshow.
Square Only
Instagram enabled rectangular photos for single-image posts some time ago, but this feature only works with square. Instagram says this limitation is “for now.”
Panoramas
This also opens a nifty new opportunity for a better way to share panoramas by splitting them up into tiles that the viewer can then swipe through.
