How to make a LinkedIn carousel (the 2026 guide)

A LinkedIn carousel is a document post: you upload a PDF, and LinkedIn renders each page as a swipeable slide in the feed. That one fact explains most of what beginners get wrong — there is no "carousel" button, no image gallery, and no video involved. You make a multi-page document, sized like a social post, and upload it as a document.

Here's the whole process, including the sizes that work in 2026 and the part nobody tells you about slide count.

The specs that matter

• Size: 1080×1080 (square) or 1080×1350 (4:5 portrait). Portrait takes more of the screen and tends to hold attention longer.
• Format: PDF. LinkedIn accepts PPT/PPTX/DOC/DOCX too, but PDF is the only one that renders predictably.
• Page limit: LinkedIn allows up to 300 pages. Nobody swipes 300 pages.
• File size: keep it under 10MB so the first slide renders before the reader scrolls past.
• Text: put it on the slide as part of the design. Document text is rendered as an image in the feed, so tiny body copy becomes unreadable on phones.

How many slides?

Seven to twelve. Under seven, the idea doesn't develop enough to justify the format — it should have been a single image. Over twelve, completion rate falls off a cliff, and completion is what the algorithm reads as quality.

The structure that survives: slide one is a hook (a claim or a question, eight words or fewer reads best), slides two through N-1 each pay off one point, the last slide is a CTA. One idea per slide. If a slide has two points, it's two slides.

The manual workflow

1. Design the slides. Any design tool works. Set the canvas to 1080×1350, build slide one as the hook, keep your colors and typefaces consistent on every page.

2. Export as PDF. One page per slide, in order. Check the file is under 10MB.

3. Upload as a document. Start a post, choose "Add a document," attach the PDF, give it a title. The title text matters — it's indexed.

4. Write the caption. The caption sells the swipe. Lead with the same hook as slide one, then add the context the slides don't carry.

That's a real workflow, and for one carousel it's fine. The tax shows up at carousel three: every deck needs design time, every caption needs writing, and keeping slide twelve in the same visual voice as slide one — across weeks of posts — is exactly the kind of discipline that dies by post 30.

The version where the deck builds itself

This is the part we built flypost.ai for. Instead of opening a design tool, you start from a brand kit extracted from your website — your five colors with roles, your real typefaces, your voice. Describe the topic, pick a slide count, and the pipeline drafts the full deck on-brand, writes the LinkedIn caption and hashtags from the same idea, and shows you a native-format preview before anything publishes.

The hard part of carousels was never the PDF. It's making deck forty look as considered as deck one.

The same idea also ships to Instagram, TikTok, X, and Reddit with per-platform captions and the right image sizes — portrait where portrait wins, square where square wins. And every angle is checked against your posting history first, so the carousel you publish in June doesn't quietly repeat March.

Do carousels actually earn the effort?

Across published engagement studies from the major scheduling vendors, document posts consistently rank among LinkedIn's highest-engagement formats — typically beating single-image posts by a wide margin on dwell time, because every swipe is another engagement signal. The format rewards exactly one thing: a reason to keep swiping. Which brings it back to the hook, the one-point-per-slide rule, and stopping at twelve.

Make the first one by hand to learn the shape. Then decide whether the next thirty are a design job or a review task.