Instagram Rolls Out Major Carousel Update: Unique Individual Captions Now Available For Every Slide

Instagram’s carousel feature, which lets users share up to 20 separate photos and videos within a single post, has long been one of the platform’s most popular, high-engagement content formats. Now, the widely used tool is receiving one of its most practical major upgrades to date.

As of Thursday morning, creators can finally add custom captions to each individual slide in a carousel post. Before this change rolled out, the only caption option was a single universal text block placed at the bottom of the full post, which stayed identical across every slide in the sequence.

For years, creators had to rely on clunky workarounds to add context specific to separate slides: they either had to manually edit text directly onto the image or video file of each slide, or outline what every slide covered in the one main post caption.

According to Meta Platforms — the parent company that owns Instagram, alongside Facebook and WhatsApp — this new update streamlines the entire process dramatically. The feature works by displaying different unique captions at the bottom of the screen as viewers swipe through the carousel’s slide sequence.

When building a standard carousel post, users will now see a new dropdown menu on the final step before publishing. From this menu, they can choose to stick with the original format of one single caption for the full post, or opt into the new multiple-caption setting. Creators who select the new option can swipe through each of their uploaded slides to write individual custom captions, and each tailored caption will automatically appear under the corresponding media as users navigate the carousel.