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About this tool
Plan carousel slide order, hooks and swipe pacing, with projected swipe-through retention and read time per slide.
Instagram Carousel Planner turns a slide count and a swipe-through rate into a finished slide-by-slide plan with roles, word budgets, read time and projected retention. It assigns every position a job — hook, promise, points, recap, call to action — then models drop-off geometrically, so if s is the share of viewers who swipe once, s^(n-1) reach slide n. Read time uses 238 words per minute, the mean silent reading rate reported by Brysbaert (2019).
Open Instagram Carousel Planner on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Every slide position gets a defined job and a concrete instruction for what belongs on it.
A per-slide bar shows the share of viewers still present, so long carousels reveal their own cost.
Word counts convert to read seconds at 238 wpm with a minimum glance time for image-led slides.
Up to 20 photos or videos in a single carousel post. Longer is not automatically better: at an 85% per-slide swipe rate only about 32% of viewers reach slide 8, and about 15% reach slide 13.
Use 1080 x 1350 px, a 4:5 portrait frame — the tallest ratio the feed shows without cropping, so it occupies the most screen. Keep every slide in the carousel at the same ratio, because Instagram crops the whole set to match the first one.
Roughly 20-30 words on a standard point slide, which reads in about 5-8 seconds at 238 words per minute. A hook slide should be far shorter — under 10 words, set large enough to read at thumbnail size.
Only if you want one specific action, and it works best when the carousel already delivered the promise made on slide one. Saves and shares are influenced by many factors outside slide design, so treat any projection here as a planning estimate rather than a forecast.