The Swipeable Instagram Carousel
Instagram doesn’t just want you to use their Snapchat Stories-like feature to share more than a complete, single image of your experience. They want you to share stories like these through your normal feed as well. To that end, they have created Carousel, which is designed to make it easy to share one video or ten images in a single, swipeable post.
Think of them as Instagram albums that offer up permanent photos/videos around a specific theme.
Essentially, Instagram wants to be there for the whole story. What they do not want to be is the app that only shows people the highlights. This notion has been thrown around Instagram before and it prompted the release of the Instagram Stories feature. The idea here is to take the pressure off people to get that one perfect photo. By working with carousel-style posts, better algorithms, and the Stories feature, Instagram certainly seems poised to change the relationship it currently shares with some six hundred million monthly users.
When you go to post to your Instagram feed, you will see an option that allows you to select multiple pictures. You will then be given the ability to edit as many as ten photos/videos individually, or with a single filter being applied to everything. At this point, you can now toy with features like the order in which the images appear, as well as the ability to tag your friends and family. Since all of your photos/videos are being converted into just a single post, it’s important to keep in mind that you are going to have everything in the way of comments and likes under that single post. Users won’t be able to go through the photos and like specific elements, although that certainly seems like something that could change in the future.
For the time being, you will have to present everything you want to post in the square format. This might prove to be annoying for some users.
When you share one of these posts to your feed, friends will see a set of blue dots. These dots will indicate to your followers that it’s a carousel-style post. They will then be able to swipe through the series to see everything you have put together.