Instagram has rolled out a carousel editor inside its standalone video app Edits, letting creators combine photos and videos on a single canvas using the app’s existing editing tools alongside new features built specifically for the format.

Dan Moreno, a Design Engineer on the Edits team, said the feature was a repeatedly requested addition since the app’s debut. “When we asked creators what they hoped Edits could do next, carousels came up again and again,” Moreno wrote in Instagram’s announcement. The update lets a photo bleed across slides and a headline carry over multiple frames, and gives creators access to Edits’ existing color grading, scale, rotation, layout, and cutout tools within carousel projects. Saved presets, including fonts, colors, and audio, carry over from a creator’s other Edits projects.

The feature is available now on iOS, with Android support still in development. Creators can post finished carousels directly to Instagram from within Edits or download them for use elsewhere, without re-exporting or uploading separately.

Instagram launched Edits as a standalone app in April 2025 with tools modeled on ByteDance’s CapCut, including background replacement, automatic captioning, and AI-powered image-to-video animation, arriving as CapCut itself faced a potential U.S. ban tied to TikTok’s ownership fight. The app has since expanded incrementally, and the carousel editor extends that same CapCut-style toolkit to a format Instagram has been pushing harder in its algorithm.

That push shows up in the platform’s own performance data. A Metricool analysis of nearly 25 million Instagram posts published earlier this year found carousels generated nine times more saves than single-image posts, more than double the reach and views, and nearly four times the interactions, while accounts posted carousels 37% less often than single images. Shares on carousels rose across every account size tier the report tracked, including 131% growth among accounts with more than a million followers. Single-image posts, by contrast, declined across most of the same metrics, with reach down 21.96% and engagement rate down 45.98% year over year.

Instagram’s own post pointed to an existing creator as an example of the new capability in use. Beauty creator Raven, who posts as @beautymavenraven, used the carousel editor to showcase a rotation of makeup products with stickers, mixed photo and video slides, and cutout effects.

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Check Out Our Podcast