How to Use ChatGPT + Canva to Create Viral Instagram Reels & Carousels (No Experience Needed)

 How to Make a Carousel on Canva: From Beginner to Viral Creator (2025 Guide)

Carousel posts on Instagram receive 2 times more views and 1.9 times more user engagement when compared to simple static posts. Learning how to create carousels on Canva can drastically improve your social media strategy.  

Carousels have individual slides that users can swipe through. Viewers are highly encouraged to stay engaged for longer periods of time, which is why Instagram’s algorithm gives less popular creators more opportunities for visibility. Even novice graphic designers will be able to create elegant carousel posts with Canva, courtesy of our comprehensive walkthrough. We explain all the essential steps to post carousels on Instagram. You will know how to properly divide their images into scrollable segments, and will also be able to design portrait-oriented carousels (1080px × 1350px) so as to make the most out of the screens on their devices.  

Choosing Your Carousel Topic and Structure

A successful carousel stems from a detailed strategy formed even before opening Canva. To create something that is eye-catching, it is important to emphasize thoughtful planning. This post details how you can select the correct topic for your carousels and curate your content for optimizing impact.  

Identify a theme that resonates to a section of your audience 

With carousels, thorough research is required, and this is why having an understanding of your audience comes in incredibly handy. Ask yourself what issue does your audience needs help with that is going to lead to him sharing and saving your design.

The most effective carousels resonate with your followers’ needs and interests. Marketing funnel content speaks to social media experts, and they suggest that captivating carousel posts begin at the very ‘top of funnel’ and work their way down.

These methods might provide you the inspiration you need:

    •  Look at your essays or other assignments and see if there are any patterns in your highest performing posts.

    •  Consider queries that your current followers or subscribers have.

    •  Check out trending discussions in your niche on Reddit and Quora.

Remember that relevance is extremely important. A successful ad campaign for carousels with LinkedIn Business are more focused on carousel engagement. Irrespective of whether you intend to educate, promote products, or share your brand’s narrative, make sure your theme resonates with the target audience you want to attract.

Decide how many slides you need

More slides do not always translate into better outcome and though Instagram allows 10 slides per carousel, research indicates that 3-5 slides are optimal for strong engagement. This number allows to establish the theme and ensures that viewers remain captivated. 

These proven formats work best, your focus defines how your carousel will be structured. Carousels focused on storytelling should follow the classic narrative arc — hook, development, climax, resolution. First slide viewership is most crucial – if the aimed audience does not shift their post swiping towards right, achievement will remain elusive.

Employ ChatGPT when you run out of new content ideas

Coming up with new ideas for a carousel can be very straining, but Free-Edu does not need to be. You can make use of ChatGPT to help you refine helpful suggestions and explore new options that you may not have thought of before.  

For the best results with carousel ideas in ChatGPT, give a brief description of your niche and the audience that you want to target. For example, you may pose a question such as “Provide ideas for a carousel post regarding [your topic] and provide it to the people interested in [audience interest].”   

You can also ask ChatGPT to write the slides for you: “Generate [number] slides about [your topic] where each slide's content prompts the next slide's content.” Such foundational drafts would be very easy to polish later on.  

You should set the goal of utilizing AI to explore new possibilities rather than replacing your voice. As it turns out, creators who let AI write everything for them, end up sounding emotionless and bland. Make sure to emphasize the ideas generated by outline upfront.  

Plan your slides using Canva so that curiosity builds through the slides. Ensure that from one slide, the viewer is curious enough to want to move to the next one, and cannot wait until they get to the next CTA—for what social media marketers have dubbed “open loops.”

Organizing Your Canva Workspace

After planning your carousel content, it is finally time to organize your Canva workspace. Every professional carousel post should be set up to technically flow between slides, rather than creators moving organically from slide to slide oftentimes skipping over this step.

Creating Whimsical Designs within Canva

Setting up your canva carousel starts with creating a canvas of the correct size, which is the first step of the process. Specific measurements for Instagram require you to highlight certain post styles.

Step-by-step process for creating a custom-sized design:

    •  Select Your Canva Dashboard and Click on the Custom Size Button

    •  Head to the dropdown to select the measuring unit you prefer (as a general rule social media works best in pixels)

    •  For your calculation of width, follow this equation: 1080px multiplied by the number of slides you want to include

    •  For height, you can opt between two choices: **these options will be chosen based on the square or portrait format:**            -squared carousel post: 1080px or portrait methodology: 1350px-

Portrait works better overall as increased dimension encourages higher engagement rates, but using this 4-slide carousel example 4320px×1350px will give you the same distance using a 4-slide carousel.

Remember that all sides need to be between 40px and 8000px, otherwise Canva’s dimension limits will be enforced.

Use guides and rulers for alignment

With guides and rulers, you can achieve exact alignment which defines the struggles of a novice from expert level when it comes to viral carousels. As with other design tools, on canva, rulers and guides make precision alignment straightforward.

Enable these features by:

    •  Clicking on the top left File

    •  Selecting View settings from the sidebar

    •  Checking both Show rulers and guides (or press Shift + R)

Guides have to be added to mark the boundary slides in addition to the rulers that appear on the Template. Rulers show on the the top and left sides of the canvas. The subsequent step is to add guides that help to delineate the boundaries.

Your funnel also needs vertical guides set at each interval of 1080px. A 4-slide carousel needs guides at 1080px,2160px, and also 3240px.

Guides can be added both manually or through presets.

- Drag guides from the rulers directly onto the canvas

- Navigate to File > Settings > Add guides and Select a preset or create a custom grid.

A tip is that you can set a 1080px rectangle as a placeholder for each slide. These rectangles can then be locked separately and moved to the back layer, therefore marking their borders into clear distinctions for slide content.

With the Canva tools, alignment of objects such as images to be centered in every slide section is possible. Position Ex-X,Y coordinates. So for elements to be placed consistently on diffrent slides, they can set the same X-Y coordinates.

Your Carousels after setting up the workspace will look professional as the setting up of workspace eliminates unnecessary troubleshooting, ensuring smooth transitions during slides. And effortless seamless switch between slides.

Creating A Carousel in Canva

The overall aesthetic of your carousel greatly influences its performance and effectiveness. Now that the workspace has been set up to your preference, let’s make sure that the captivating carousel you create will hold the attention of viewers throughout all the slides.

Make Sure That Your First Slide Is The Best

A storefront window does not sell, but rather showcases items for sale in an eye catching way – this is what your slide needs to do. As eye catching as the carousel needs to be, each slide also serves a particular function – starting from your first slide, which should create curiosity about the rest of the content.

Canva suggests that for the images used in the first slide:

    •  Cover the text with scrolling stopping headlines and bold images or clever hooks

    •  Display a minimal amount of text because the original purpose makes scrolling irresistible.

    •  Emphasize less, and make sure that high contrast elements are incorporated so as to be noticed in saturated feeds.

    •  Ensure to highlight a problem that resonates with the audience that you target and look for solutions that your products present.

The first step needs to be a scenario – not a sentence. Social media experts validate the claim of “powerful first slides get more engagement” as fact.

Utilize Overlapping Elements For Better Flow

Preferably designed carousels look more professional with visual seamless transitions between slides rather than jumps. Position elements so that they can overlap the edge of the slide boundary without getting clipped.

Achieving this effect in Canva:

    •  Place visual features exactly where two slides meet.

    •  Insert photos or design elements which overlap slide boundaries.

    •  Employ large photos and gradients as backgrounds that span over multiple slides.  

    •  Combine differing layouts while maintaining visual print harmony.  

These are referred to by designers as “open loops” – visual cues that ignite intrigue about what’s coming next and leads viewers to swipe more.

Integrate fonts and colors that match

A professional carousel has to have the same style throughout. Uniformity – repeating the same visual elements in every slide builds brand recognition and creates cohesion.  

Maintain these settings:  

    •    Set 1-2 fonts for your carousel (headlines and body text).  

    •    Use brand colors on all slides.  

    •    Save color palettes in Canva as templates.  

    •    Keep style fragmentation of icons, illustrations, and graphics uniform.  

Applying gradients ensures continuity between slides. To find them, click the Color tile in Canva’s editor toolbar; there are numerous options in the Gradients section.  

Social media marketing experts recommend giving text elements sufficient white space. With infographics, do not attempt to put multiple sentences on a single slide. Instead, allow ample space around the text for comfortable readability.  

Add a CTA to the last slide.

Without proper guidance towards actionable goals, beautiful carousels fall short. This crucial finishing slide should always be included.

Call to action (CTAs) strong for carousel include:

    •    Utilize a strong action request (“Shop now,” “Join today,” “Learn more.”)

    •     Add buttons with eye-popping colors

    •     Branded identically to prior slides

    •     Show marked clear and articulated next steps.

Your contact information or profile links are useful on the last slide. Canva's button elements help form CTAs with distinction.

To further increase comments and algorithm signals, end with a question to comment. Summarize key points for the second-to-last and place your CTA on the last slide.

This will help you create professional looking Canva carousels that will meaningfully engage with the audience.

Exporting and splitting your images for the carousel.

Achieving your desired effect hinges upon how you export and slice your design into slides since it determines how effortless the effect you worked hard to achieve is. Split your seamlessly designed slides with all the precise details you added along the way.

Start by downloading your design as one image

To get that seamless look, you will have to first export your entire Canva design as one single image. Then, you can go ahead and choose each page you want to include.

    •  Afterwards, Select the "Download" button in the upper right corner of your workspace.

    •  Pick PNG so that you get the best quality of the image after saving the template.

 

    •  Make sure to select "the whole design" instead of pages individually.

    •  Make sure to keep these files accessible on your device for easy retrieval.

In this scenario, the use of PNG files rather than JPEG files is optimal as PNG files preserve image quality even with compression and supports transparency which is vital for smooth transitioning of carousel elements. JPEG formats will inevitably lose some detail due to image compression, however, PNGs will keep the critical definition within your designs.  

We will then take the one photo and prepare it into slides that can be easily and individually posted on Instagram. There are numerous free tools online that allow users to split an image into multiple parts effortlessly.  

If you are looking for a simple site, Pinetools is a great suggestion. You just need to upload your image, click Split Image and you can then download your slides that have been perfectly divided. Under "How to split the image," choose "Horizontally," select “Quantity of blocks (equal width)” and enter the number of slides you want.

Another feature Instagram Grid Maker allows is integration with designs, provided that you have uploaded the design that you want to use. Adjust “columns” to the number of slides you intend to use, and choose “carousel” under “image cut” for automatic slide separation.

In case you want to complete everything in Canva, their image splitter app might be what you are looking for. Search for “image splitter” under the Apps tab on Canva, export the design you want altered, and indicate how many rows and columns are needed for 1080x1080 or 1080x1350 slides.

Check cropping and resolution prior to uploads

The images you export should have the proper resolution. Instagram prefers a range of 1080×1080 (square) to 1080×1350 (portrait). Portrait format certainly takes more screen real estate, which helps with visibility.  

After splitting the images, blurry or pixelated images are a common nuisance. These problems usually arise due to:  

    •  Your original design was not sized correctly(for reference, width = 1080px * number of slides)  

    •  The tool used to split the images compressed them  

    

    •  Changes in aspect ratio during export  

Ensure that all images on your device in sequence before upload. Confirm that any overlapping elements are aligned in the slides and the text is crisp throughout. These final checks ensure that your followers will witness the smooth carousel effect you wanted to create.  

Correct Instagram Uploading Procedures  

Everything has now been split into individual slides for your carousel. Let's get the upload process right. Having a beautifully designed carousel is of little use it you don’t upload it correctly to Instagram.   

Do not forget to keep the right order of slides

The order of your slides matters extremely. Instagram displays carousel slides in the exact order they are uploaded. So this will either provide a seamless story or an utter mess. Take note of the following while uploading:

    •  Avoid stuffing the caption with everything you want your audience to consider. 

    •  Instead, use the caption as a way to narrate what they’re looking at

    •  Cultivate a hook that conveys the story in the first slide and align the rest of the slides with this narrative

Questions at the end invite responses, which is great for interactions.

As far as Instagram is concerned, a typical carousel post is capped at 10 slides (they've tried increasing it to 15). Pick images that logically start and conclude a story to make it more cohesive.

Conclusion

With Canva, transforming dull marketing strategies into eye-catching ones is as easy as creating dynamic Instagram carousels. 

This document walks you through designing your carousels, starting from selecting the themes to crafting the structured symmetry of the final product.  

Once properly designed, carousels with strategically dispersed static images present numerous opportunities for user engagement, allowing users to be captured even while scrolling. 

Even though the particulars seem daunting, my recommendation is to just give it a shot two or three times—you’ll soon find the 1080px × 1350px portrait dimensions second nature. 

These measurements are particularly advantageous because, in addition to offering extra screen space, they enhance visibility and engagement.

Thank You